"Forget the rural idylls. This sublime show recasts John Constable as the godfather of the Avant Garde, producing explosive, nightmarish paintings of a vanishing world." – Jonathan Jones, Guardian One of Britain’s greatest landscape painters, John Constable (1776–1837) was brought up in Dedham Vale, the valley of the River Stour in Suffolk. The eldest son of a wealthy mill owner, he entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1800 at the age of 24, and thereafter committed himself to painting nature out of doors. His ‘six-footers’, such as The Hay Wain and The Leaping Horse, were designed to promote landscape as a subject and to stand out in the Academy’s Annual Exhibition. Despite this, he sold few paintings in his lifetime and was elected a Royal Academician late in his career. With texts by leading authorities on the artist, this handsome book looks at the freedom of Constable’s late works and records his enormous contribution to the English landscape tradition.

Business leader and arts patron Sir Edwin A. G. Manton (1909-2005) and his wife Florence, Lady Manton, assembled an outstanding collection of 18th- and 19th-century British art. A gift to the Clark Art Institute from the Manton Foundation in 2007, their collection features more than three hundred oil paintings, watercolors, drawings, and prints, including works by John Constable, J. M. W. Turner, Thomas Gainsborough, and William Blake. In a series of wide-ranging essays, prominent scholars consider the major works and themes in the collection, relating them to larger issues within the field of British studies. Individual essays are devoted to Constable's oil sketches, cloud studies, and magisterial painting The Wheat Field; the growth of the watercolor tradition; print portfolios and narrative series; Thomas Rowlandson's satiric drawings; and Gainsborough's use of experimental materials as revealed through recent scientific analysis. The volume concludes with an illustrated checklist of the works in the collection. Distributed for the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute