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Constable's Year
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A Radio 4 'Book of the Week': Shaped by the cycle of the natural world, a fresh look at the life and work of John Constable to celebrate the 250th anniversary of his birth in 2026
A Radio 4 Book of the Week
'A marvellous book' Ali Smith
Shaped by the cycle of the natural world, a fresh look at the life and work of John Constable to celebrate the 250th anniversary of his birth in 2026.
As exhilarating as a lungful of oxygen: that's how some of his contemporaries felt about John Constable's paintings. Others, though, were baffled by his uncompromisingly fresh and realistic treatment of the natural world. Susan Owens follows Constable through the seasons, tracing the rhythms and resonances of the artist's year to offer a vivid, unconventional perspective on this beloved figure.
Whether in London in May, preparing pictures for exhibition and longing for the Suffolk spring, or painting boat-builders and waiting to be married in a particularly gloomy September, Constable's life and work were unusually shaped by the yearly cycles of weather and agriculture, as well as by the often competing demands of the art world. Raised in Suffolk and trained to manage his father's land, his rural background had an enduring impact on his painting. His was the approach of one who knew the laneways, ploughs and millponds he painted intimately, and who understood the countryside as a place of both labour and natural phenomena.
Though today he is often considered a traditional artist, in truth John Constable was a radical. His sketchbooks and paintings reject second-hand, slip-shod versions of nature, instead subjecting the land, its people and industry to intense scrutiny; developing a new kind of painting to fit the landscape he saw with his farmer's eye and felt beneath the soles of his boots.
'A marvellous book' Ali Smith
Shaped by the cycle of the natural world, a fresh look at the life and work of John Constable to celebrate the 250th anniversary of his birth in 2026.
As exhilarating as a lungful of oxygen: that's how some of his contemporaries felt about John Constable's paintings. Others, though, were baffled by his uncompromisingly fresh and realistic treatment of the natural world. Susan Owens follows Constable through the seasons, tracing the rhythms and resonances of the artist's year to offer a vivid, unconventional perspective on this beloved figure.
Whether in London in May, preparing pictures for exhibition and longing for the Suffolk spring, or painting boat-builders and waiting to be married in a particularly gloomy September, Constable's life and work were unusually shaped by the yearly cycles of weather and agriculture, as well as by the often competing demands of the art world. Raised in Suffolk and trained to manage his father's land, his rural background had an enduring impact on his painting. His was the approach of one who knew the laneways, ploughs and millponds he painted intimately, and who understood the countryside as a place of both labour and natural phenomena.
Though today he is often considered a traditional artist, in truth John Constable was a radical. His sketchbooks and paintings reject second-hand, slip-shod versions of nature, instead subjecting the land, its people and industry to intense scrutiny; developing a new kind of painting to fit the landscape he saw with his farmer's eye and felt beneath the soles of his boots.
Praise for Constable's Year
I'll be keeping this marvellous book, whose roots are deep, whose take on Constable's history, art and life is so enlightening and whose landscapes are as alive and fresh as ever, close to me through all the seasons
Ali Smith
In this extraordinary book Susan Owens draws a multidimensional portrait of Constable, bringing him alive not only biographically but also meteorologically and geographically in his love of the skies above and the work-a-day East Anglian landscape
Martin Gayford, author of Constable in Love
It is rare for an art historian to be so intimate with a painter's every work, and with the degree to which a single sketched idea could be taken up and developed into a painting years or even decades later. Constable's Year is the result of the author's own years spent affectionately immersed in Constable's drawings and oil sketches ... The result is a biography which enables the reader to come very close to a romantic artist who could write with sincerity that "painting is with me but another word for feeling"
Literary Review
You really need Susan Owens's delightful journey through Constable's Year to appreciate how intensely he registered what was going on around him
Ferdinand Mount, TLS
About the Author
Dr Susan Owens is an expert on British landscape art and a leading critical voice in the field. Her publications include The Story of Drawing: An Alternative History (2024), which was Apollo magazine's 2024 Book of the Year, Imagining England's Past: Inspiration, Enchantment, Obsession (2023) and Spirit of Place: Artists, Writers and the British Landscape (2020). She was Curator of Paintings at the V&A until 2013, and was involved in the major V&A exhibition and catalogue 'Constable: The Making of a Master' (2014).
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