Whenever I visit the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, I gravitate to one rapid, brilliant depiction of the sky over Hampstead on the first of October, 1822 in which John Constable catches the dark clouds beginning to shadow the bright cumulus at the close of an autumn day. Constable’s sky study is at once virtuosic in fixing a moment in the clouds and poignant in the evanescence of what its records.

The depiction of ordinary places, and of the changing seasons and skies which shadow or illuminate them, is at the core of Susan Owens’s comprehensive and touching Constable’s Year. Near the beginning she quotes from one of Constable’s letters, proof that everything he saw and painted was based on his native Stour valley in Suffolk, and the intensity of observation developed there in boyhood:

… the sound of water escaping from mill-dams, etc., willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts, and brickwork, I love such things … those scenes made me a painter and I am grateful. 

Owens’s book brings alive the degree to which Constable’s apprehension of nature was grounded in his apprenticeship to his father, who was a farmer, miller and barge-owner. Constable had been out in all weathers, watching the skies for signs of rain. He knew the year week by week, the movements of flocks and clouds, the slow ripening of the grain to harvest. When he paints a boy straining to guide a barge under a bridge in Flatford Mill: Scene on a Navigable River, you know that he has set his own feet firmly, and strained his own young shoulders, to fix a pole in the bank of the Stour and heave a great barge forward. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Constable never painted English landscape under generically golden, pseudo-Italian skies. Rather, he is a precise poet of stacked clouds and slanting summer sun in the two 1815 views from his father’s house, of the showery evening which clouded East Bergholt Fair in 1811, of the stormy ink-blue twilight over London on 7 December 1833, when the wind and rain rattled his window in Hampstead. 

Unsurprisingly, this genial man could be harsh about those of his contemporaries who painted summery sub-Claudes, or brown, generic studies of autumn woodlands, one of which he memorably compared to ‘a large cow-turd’. (One of the many pleasures of this precise book is the exposition of the construction of the late-season manure heap – ‘a runover dungle’ – which sits in the foreground of a delicate, silvery view of The Stour Valley and Dedham Village, painted in 1815.)

The book is structured elegantly by the four seasons (seen also as the four ages of the painter’s life) and this offers many fruitful approaches to Constable’s understated, attentive art. Spring considers the painter’s Suffolk youth and his arrival in London to study art in the last years of the 18th century. Summer covers the years of his first mature landscapes and pencil studies of Suffolk trees and lane ends, and of his long courtship of Maria Bicknell until their eventual marriage in 1816. Autumn shows us their honeymoon in Salisbury and Dorset, the happiness expressed by Constable’s serene pencil study of Salisbury Cathedral and the Bishop’s Palace, made on 8 October that year. These were also the years of his best-known riverbank paintings: The White Horse, The Hay Wain, The Leaping Horse. 

But Maria Constable’s delicate health, further strained by the births of their beloved children, took the family regularly (and then permanently) to Hampstead, and also took Maria away to Brighton, often compelling the couple to live apart. Constable’s most personal oil sketches belong to this period, as do his wonderful studies of clouds and some of his most passionate pencil drawings, including the Hampstead fir trees which caused William Blake to exclaim ‘this is not drawing, but inspiration!’ In 1827 Constable took his two oldest children on a visit to Flatford Mill, where (after his daughter Minna had thoroughly let the family down by exclaiming that the Stour valley was ‘only fields’) he made loving, easy drawings of his family enjoying a fine October. One shows his brother Golding shooting on the towpath, attended by a cocky, alert retriever, with a foreground study of Constable’s talismanic old rotten planks and slimy posts. Another shows his children fishing from a barge at Flatford, a wash-drawing whose sunrays and watery reflections shimmer with his happiness at seeing his children on the river of his childhood. 

Constable’s winter began with the death of his wife in 1828, after which he painted his sombre, boiling-skied Hadleigh Castle in 1829, the year he was elected a full Royal Academician. From then until his death in 1837 he began to think of his legacy, organising for mezzotints to be made from an idiosyncratic selection of his landscapes, from which the great Academy ‘six-footers’ were mostly absent. He worked his poor, skilled engraver terribly hard to produce his Various Subjects of Landscape, a collection which, fittingly, shows the East Anglian landscape he loved in all four seasons. He died after a few years of illness during which he still made some extraordinary, prophetic ink-wash drawings of flat fields and church towers under driving, overwhelming storms. 

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, particularly the magnificent collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Susan Owens has taken care to know her subject’s Hampstead, Suffolk and Brighton; she has walked in his footsteps, looking out from his viewpoints; she has made her way over the stiles and along the familiar footpaths and riverbanks. 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’.