John Constable

The son of a wealthy corn merchant, English landscape artist John Constable (June 11, 1776-March 31, 1837), sought to capture nature's realism rather than an interpretative pictorial style as was prevalent in landscape painting at the time. He valued the nuanced aspects of weather conditions, light, and shadow and conveyed these through expressive brush strokes on canvas. Along with his large-scale finished works, he called “six footers", Constable produced landscapes and a series of influential full-size studies. These works show a depth of expressive brushwork that influenced the Romantics such as Delacroix and later were extrapolated to become Impressionism in the 19th century.