Turner And Constable

Exploring the development, variety, and innovation of the landscape oil sketch, this book is generously illustrated with many masterpieces of 19th-century British landscape painting.

A sweeping look at the lives and work of two important English Romantic painters, from a Los Angeles Times Book Prize–winning author. Renowned poet Stanley Plumly, who has been praised for his “obsessive, intricate, intimate and brilliant” (Washington Post) nonfiction, explores immortality in art through the work of two impressive landscape artists: John Constable and J.M.W. Turner. How is it that this disparate pair will come to be regarded as Britain’s supreme landscape painters, precursors to Impressionism and Modernism? How did each painter’s life influence his work? Almost exact contemporaries, both legendary artists experience a life-changing tragedy—for Constable it is the long illness and death of his wife; for Turner, the death of his singular parent and supporter, his father. Their work will take on new power thereafter: Constable, his Hampstead cloud studies; Turner, his Venetian watercolors and oils. Seeking the transcendent aesthetic awe of the sublime and reeling from their personal anguish, these talented painters portrayed the terrible beauty of the natural world from an intimate, close-up perspective. Plumly studies the paintings against the pull of the artists’ lives, probing how each finds the sublime in different, though inherently connected, worlds. At once a meditation on the difficulties in achieving truly immortal works of art and an exploration of the relationship between artist and artwork, Elegy Landscapes takes a wide-angle look at the philosophy of the sublime.

ONE OF THE TIMES AND SUNDAY TIMES' BEST BOOKS FOR 2022 'Eye-opening and full of surprises . . . A treasure' Sunday Times 'A biography as rich with colourful characters as any novel' Telegraph John Constable, the revolutionary nineteenth-century painter of the landscapes and skies of southern England, is Britain's best-loved but perhaps least understood artist. His paintings reflect visions of landscape that shocked and perplexed his contemporaries: attentive to detail, spontaneous in gesture, brave in their use of colour. What we learn from his landscapes is that Constable had sharp local knowledge of Suffolk, a clarity of expression of the skyscapes above Hampstead, an understanding of the human tides in London and Brighton, and a rare ability in his late paintings of Salisbury Cathedral to transform silent suppressed passion into paint. Yet Constable was also an active and energetic correspondent. His letters and diaries - there are over one thousand letters from and to him - reveal a man of passion, opinion and discord, while his character and personality is concealed behind the high shimmering colour of his paintings. They reveal too the lives and circumstances of his brothers and his sisters, his cousins and his aunts, who serve to define the social and economic landscape against which he can be most clearly seen. These multifaceted reflections draw a sharp picture of the person, as well as the painter. James Hamilton's biography reveals a complex, troubled man, and explodes previous mythologies about this timeless artist, and establishes him in his proper context as a giant of European art.

"J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) is widely regarded as the greatest painter Britain has ever produced. Despite the many books and exhibitions that have been devoted to him, there is one aspect of his extraordinary oeuvre that has never been thoroughly examined. Uniquely in the history of European art, he took on all comers, past and present, that he considered worthy of a challenge, creating his own images in their styles. These works were both acts of homage and a sophisticated form of art criticism, demonstrating his understanding of great art and his ability to equal or better the most celebrated exponents of the landscape tradition. No artist, however revered, was considered beyond challenge. This unique habit is clearly a key to understanding Turner's art, yet the issue is one that has so far never been thoroughly addressed on Turner and on British art of the 18th and 19th centuries. In "Turner and the Masters" leading authorities explore this fascinating aspect of his career, revealing new detail on the debts and rivalries that shaped his work in often unexpected ways. Accompanying a major touring exhibition that brings together works by Turner with masterpieces by Claude, Canaletto, Ruisdael, Van de Velde, Poussin, Rubens and Rembrandt, as well as by Turner's contemporaries including Constable and Bonnington, this book firmly positions Turner in the company of the greatest painters of all time. The contributors include Guillaume Faroult, Sarah Monks, Martin Myrone, Kathleen Nicholson, Philippa Simpson and Ian Warrell." --Book Jacket.

With fresh insight into what the great works meant when they were created and why they appeal to us now, here is a vivid tour of painting, sculpture, and architecture, past and present. "Illuminating . . . a notable accomplishment".--The New York Times. Illustrated.