Constable's Landscapes at Tate Britain 1 June-28 August

[This post has been updated with images which could not be uploaded yesterday due to a Blogger malfunction]

A new exhibition of Constable's Landscapes opens at Tate Britain today and runs until 28 August. It features his "six footer" canvases of views around the River Stour and other places in the UK. According to the exhibition briefing from Tate Britain his move to larger canvases was part of a strategy to become noticed by the Royal Academy and to paint on a scale equivalent to the classical landscape artists.

As I'm particularly partial to landscapes (and the River Stour) I'll be going to see the exhibition. I'm particularly interested in the fact that the exhibition will show how the paintings were produced including the fact that he produced full-scale preliminary sketches for some of them. The Tate site says

These large sketches, with their free and vigorous brushwork were unprecedented at the time and they continue to fascinate artists, scholars and the general public. It has been said that it is this practice more than any other aspect of Constable's work which establishes him as an avant-garde painter, resolved to re-think the demands of his art and to address them in an entirely new way. The exhibition re-unites the full-scale sketches with their corresponding finished pictures in order to explore their role in Constable's working practice.

I know from having visited the National Trust's Bridge Cottage museum at Flatford Mill - where they have an exhibition of reproductions of the six foot canvases of working life on the River Stour (see above) - that his finished paintings were produced in his studio. That exhibition also shows reproductions of some of the small sketches that he did for each painting. I shall be interested to see how he achieved a balance in the preliminary work done "plein air" (or "in the field") and that done in the studio.

The photos below are of:

• what the boatyard (in the above painting) looks like today
• the mill pond next to Willy Lott's cottage made famous in The Hay Wain
• (for further details see here)
  

I have a Gallery of Plein Air and Landscape Paintings on my website - although the largest images I've produced to date are around 25 inches! I still have a long way to go in more ways than one! However, I've been thinking about trying to reorganise my website so that I can match up the sketches I do in the field with the final paintings. At the moment I only have one page - work in progress - which gives some insight into the process of how I produce a final work.

Technorati tags: art , Constable , drawing , exhibition , gallery , landscape painting , painting , plein air , sketch , sketches , Tate