Right now the Frist Center for the Visual Arts has the honor of hosting an exhibition of eighty-five works by John Constable from the Victoria and Albert Museum in England. Apart from one "exhibition" oil painting, the rest of the works are sketches, watercolors, and drawings. The two giants in the exhibition are the six foot oil mock-ups for The Hay Wain and The Leaping Horse. How many artists are so particularistic that they would do a full scale mock-up before doing their final piece? I have enjoyed comparing The Hay Wain and The Leaping Horse to the final works. Especially The Hay Wain, which has a beautifully free and loose style missing from the completed artwork. This collection shows the process and principles intrinsic to Constable's working methods. Many of the vignettes that he sketched and sketched repeatedly, for example Lott's cottage, ended up in his completed works. What was enlightening for me was that he predated the Impressionists with his plein air painting methods. Also, their is a sepia sketch built up from ink stains—a technique that is associated with the Surrealists and Dadaists. This work is from his late period and represents a contradiction of opinions that he had held earlier in his life where he stated that the imagination did not have the same power in art that direct observation had. Overall, his work represents an idealized, picturesque, man-made landscape that shows the breadth of the nineteenth-century Romantic movement especially when one compares Constable's work to that of Turner, his contemporary.
