Why Constable Didn’t Give Up Figure Painting

This lecture, delivered by Nicholas Robbins, reflects on John Constable’s work from the 1830s by thinking about a less well-known aspect of his artistic life: figure drawing and painting, and especially his work as a visitor to the Royal Academy’s life drawing class. It was paradoxically in the spatial dynamics of the life class that Constable sought the origins of landscape painting, through the subjective, corporeal, sometimes erotic negotiation of the body’s being in space. Alongside Constable’s experiments in the Life Academy, this lecture explores the rearticulation of figure-ground relations in his printmaking projects and exhibition paintings in the early 1830s, as well as his thinking about the evolution of landscape from the bodily realm of history painting in his evolving ‘Lectures on Landscape’. While Constable staked his career on landscape, he never gave up figure painting, and this lecture will suggest that it is in the human body’s claim on painting that we can find a new vantage on Constable’s work and its relationship to art history.

This event is organised by Professor Steve Edwards, Manton Professor of British Art and Director of the Manton Centre for British Art, The Courtauld.