Stonehenge

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John Constable, Stonehenge, 1836
John Constable’s landscapes perfectly sum up the artist’s love for nature.  Constable spent his career sketching the outdoors and then later converting his sketches to paintings. Unlike many landscape artists, Constable painted places he lived around and saw every day.  He rarely traveled to find places of extraordinary beauty, but instead found splendor in his homeland. Constable grew up and lived in East Bergholt in Suffolk, England, which would later be nicknamed Constable County due to the fame of Constable’s work.  Besides Suffolk, Constable spent a lot of time in Salisbury because his good friend, John Fisher, lived there.  Fisher, an Anglican priest, became Constable’s greatest patron and would go one to commission Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows.  Due to this good friendship, Constable spent a good deal of time in Salisbury where he would become acquainted with Stonehenge.

Constable made a sketch of Stonehenge in 1820.  He would wait nearly until the end of his life to put the stone monument on a canvas.  Constable finished Stonehenge in 1836, just a year before his death.  At the time, Britain had become caught up in an age of industrialization that completely undermined Constable’s naturalism.  To retort, Constable started painting double rainbows into his work.  They appear in such paintings as Stonehenge, Landscape and Double Rainbow, and Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows.  The rainbow stands for the wonder in nature that Constable saw.  They usually emerge from a dark, cloudy sky.  The darkness surrounding these vibrant rainbows represents the brilliance of the natural world compared to the slums of the industrialized one.  Sadly, the colors of the rainbows in Stonehenge have faded.

Stonehenge ended up being unveiled at John Constable’s final exhibit in 1837.  Throughout his career, Constable found himself on the butt end of a fair amount of criticism, similar to his counterpart, Turner.  Constable’s memoirs wouldn’t be published until 1843, by which time many people had already forgotten about him.  But, as time went on, art historians began to slowly rediscover his work and found Constable had innovated many things that Turner had also come up with.  Now, the two are the most well known British artists of the Romantic era.  Like Stonehenge, time has failed to topple the large, insurmountable rock that John Constable’s art has become.

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