EUROPEAN ROMANTICISM
CONSTABLE, John (East Bergholt, 1776 – Hampstead, 1837)
The Lock
1824
Oil sobre canvas, 142.2 x 120.7 cm
Colección Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza
The painting represents the lock of Flatford Mill, on the river Stour. Constable knew well the place from his childhood, as his father owned the mill. The Stour valley in Suffolk, its fields and its people are often depicted in Constable’s paintings. In all the works he presented to the Royal Academy from 1812 till 1825 there are views of the Stour valley. Among them, there were the large format canvases (the “sixfooters”, as the artists called them, although not all of them measure six feet) that Constable considered as a sort of compendium and the highest exponents of his artistic endeavour.
This large format canvases had a lengthy elaboration; a great number of sketches were executed, the last one of which—made in the real size and in oil—was used to check the effects of the mass of light and colour. In order to prepare The Lock, Constable, who at the time lived in Hampstead, near London, moved to Dedham in the spring of 1823 to draw the sketches, although he did not start the real-size study (now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art) until after Christmas.
While executing the final version, he made three changes that should be mentioned. First, he added the clump of trees on the right, which did not really exist, as can be deduced from the sketches the artist had made in situ the previous year. The second change regards the state of the lock. The inhabitants of Dedham and of the nearby villages in the valley had been complaining for many years about the deplorable state of the lock on the river Stour. Apparently, the protests had been accepted, as in 1823, when Constable made the first sketches, the lock had already been repaired. However, when executing the final picture, Constable represented the lock in the deplorable state in which he had seen it in his childhood. The third change can be perceived in the stance of the man with the red waistcoat handling the mechanism of the gate. In previous works, as well as in the initial sketches of the work analysed here, Constable had painted other characters intent upon the same occupation, but he always depicted them informally. In The Lock, however, the figure constitutes the focus of the composition. In order to give it greater emphasis, Constable puts the man’s vertical outline in relation with the church tower. If we compare the real-size sketch with the final work, we can perceive a slight but important change in the stance of the figure: in the former, the man has both feet on the ground, while in the latter his left knee leans on the mechanism of the lock gate. With it, the painter brings out the epic nature of the man’s action, emphasizing the internal unity of a physical effort requiring the participation of his whole body.
The effect of the painting cannot be separated from the artist’s treatment of the light, which seems to move as the sky changes before our eyes. The point of reference for this depiction of the light under changing skies was, naturally, Jacob van Ruisdael. In this painting, Constable used other resources borrowed from Ruisdael, like, for example, his way of representing flowing water with white oil impastos in order to achieve an effect of turbulent foam or the glazing which reproduces the iridescent effect of wet old wood (see, for example, Two Watermills with an Open Lock, a work by Ruisdael dated in 1653, now at the Paul Getty Museum). At the same time, we have good reasons to believe that the idea of the clump of trees added on the right has its origin in Claude Lorrain.
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Due to the influence of Ruisdael’s pictorial model, and to the treatment of light, this painting is a landmark in Constable’s artistic career. Also, the substitution of the real landscape with one recalling the artist’s childhood shows his romantic sensitivity. Another significant aspect is the combination of the authenticity of the rural landscape with the naturalness of the work on the land, resulting in a type of paradise, threatened by human development.
In 1825 The British Institution decided to substitute its yearly exhibition of old masters with a show of contemporary works by living British artists, and invited Constable to participate. Thrilled by the idea that old paintings could give way to modern works, Constable sent what he considered to be his three best “sixfooters” up to that moment: The White Horse (1819), Stratford Castle (1820) and The Lock (1824).
Tomàs Llorens
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