The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (112 page)

(1776–1837).
English painter, ranked with
Turner
as one of the greatest British landscape artists. Although he showed an early talent for art and began painting his native Suffolk scenery before he left school, his great originality matured slowly. He committed himself to a career as an artist only in 1799, when he joined the
Royal Academy
Schools, and it was not until 1829 that he was grudgingly made a full Academician, elected by a majority of only one vote. In 1816 he became financially secure on the death of his father and married Maria Bicknell after a seven-year courtship and in the face of strong opposition from her family. During the 1820s he began to win recognition:
The Hay Wain
(NG, London, 1821) won a gold medal at the Paris
Salon
of 1824 and Constable was admired by
Delacroix
and
Bonington
among others. His wife died in 1828, however, and the remaining years of his life were clouded by despondency.
After spending some years working in the
Picturesque
tradition of landscape and the manner of
Gainsborough
, Constable developed his own original treatment from the attempt to render scenery more directly and realistically, carrying on but modifying in an individual way the tradition inherited from
Ruisdael
and the Dutch 17th-cent. landscape painters. Just as his contemporary William Wordsworth rejected what he called the ‘poetic diction’ of his predecessors, so Constable turned away from the pictorial conventions of 18th-cent. landscape painters, who, he said, were always ‘running after pictures and seeking the truth at second hand’. Constable thought that ‘No two days are alike, nor even two hours; neither were there ever two leaves of a tree alike since the creation of the world’, and in a way that was then new he represented in paint the atmospheric effects of changing light in the open air, the movement of clouds across the sky, and his excited delight at these phenomena, stemming from a profound love of the country: ‘The sound of water escaping from mill dams, willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts and brick-work, I love such things. These scenes made me a painter.’ He never went abroad, and his finest works are of the places he knew and loved best, particularly Suffolk and Hampstead, where he lived from 1821. To render the shifting flicker of light and weather he abandoned fine traditional finish, catching the sunlight in blobs of pure white or yellow, and the drama of storms with a rapid brush. Henry
Fuseli
was among the contemporaries who applauded the freshness of Constable's approach, for C. R.
Leslie
records him as saying: ‘I like de landscapes of Constable; he is always picturesque, of a fine colour, and de lights always in de right places; but he makes me call for my great coat and umbrella.’
Constable worked extensively in the open air, drawing and sketching in oils, but his finished pictures were produced in the studio. For his most ambitious works—‘sixfooters’ as he called them—he followed the unusual technical procedure of making a full-size oil sketch, and in the 20th cent. there has been a tendency to praise these even more highly than the finished works because of their freedom and freshness of brushwork. (The full-size sketch for
The Hay Wain
is in the V&A, London, which has the finest collection of Constable's work.) In England Constable had no real successor and the many imitators (who included his son
Lionel
, 1825–87) turned rather to the formal compositions than to the more direct sketches. In France, however, he was a major influence on
Romantic
painters such as Delacroix, on the members of the
Barbizon School
, and ultimately on the
Impressionists
.

 
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Constructivism
.

Russian geometric abstract art movement, founded in about 1913 by Vladimir
Tatlin
. He was joined by the brothers Antoine
Pevsner
and Naum
Gabo
, who in 1920 published their
Realist Manifesto
, in which one of the directives was ‘to construct’ art; it is from this that the name derives. Pevsner and Gabo rejected the idea that art must serve a socially useful purpose and conceived a purely abstract art that reflected modern machinery and technology and used industrial materials such as plastic and glass. Tatlin and Alexander
Rodchenko
, on the other hand, were among those who applied Constructivist principles to architecture and design. Gabo and Pevsner left Russia in 1922 after Constructivism had been condemned by the Soviet regime, and they and other exiles helped to spread the ideals of the movement throughout Europe. They were influential, for example, on the
Bauhaus
in Germany, De
Stijl
in the Netherlands, and the
Abstraction-Création
group in France, and Gabo was one of the editors of the English Constructivist manifesto,
Circle
, published in 1937.

 
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consular diptych
.

See
DIPTYCH
.

 
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conté crayon
.

A very hard type of crayon, named after Nicolas-Jacques Conté (1755–1805), the French scientist who invented it. Conté crayons are similar to
chalk
, but they have a slight greasy quality that makes them less friable. Warm red and black are the most common colours. Conté, who worked as a portrait painter in his youth, was also the inventor of the modern graphite
pencil
.

 
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continuous representation
or continuous narrative
.

A pictorial convention whereby two or more consecutive incidents from a narrative are combined in the same image. It is most common in medieval art, but occasionally occurs later. In
Pontormo's
Joseph in Egypt
(
NG
, London,
c.
1515), for example, four episodes from Genesis are shown in the same panel and the figure of Joseph appears separately in each scene.