4/18/2017 Constable in Brighton exhibition collects master's paintings of glittering seas | Art and design | The Guardian

Constable in Brighton exhibition collects

master's paintings of glittering seas
Paintings of towering waves and beached boats hint at artists empathy with his Sussex home of 1824-1828

Maev Kennedy
Thursday 6 April 2017 17.26BST

W
hen the artist Peter Harrap moved to Brighton, to a narrow street sloping down towards
the sea, he set up his studio in an upper room with a north-facing window and then
discovered to his surprise that he was not the rst artist to appreciate its airy light.
Almost two centuries earlier John Constable had set up his easel there in the seaside lodgings
he had taken for his wifes health.

An exhibition opening on Saturday at the Brighton Museum brings together for the rst time a
glittering collection of the paintings Constable made in the town, with loans from the Tate,
Royal Academy, British Museum, V&A, Cambridge University and many private collections.

Years of research by Harrap and his near neighbour, Shan Lancaster, a journalist, led to the
property at 11 Sillwood Road gaining a blue plaque when they proved this was the house
Constable had rented in 1824, on the rst of many stays over the next four years, though then
it was known as 9 Mrs Sobers Gardens.

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Constables Seascape Study: Boat and Stormy Sky 1824 28

(cropped). Photograph: PR

An uncatalogued letter sent by the artist to his wife, Maria, at the house, which Harrap found
among the artists great-great-grandsons papers in the Tate archives, had provided the nal
proof.

Harrap described the feeling of working in the same space as an artist he revered as like a tap
on the shoulder. Lancaster had learned of the connection when she rst moved to the street
from a passerby, as she was digging in her new front garden. I was tremendously excited,
started rootling about all over the place, but nobody seemed the least bit interested, so it was a
great joy to have Peter as a partner in the hunt.

When she rst learned of the connection, Lancaster asked the local museum if they had any of
his works, and was informed there were none. In fact languishing in the stores they had two
drawings, now included in the exhibition.

Sta at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery hang a Constable oil for
the new exhibition. Photograph: Gareth Fuller/PA

Constables paintings of glittering seas, or towering waves and black clouds menacing the
shermen and their boats on the beach, give a more aectionate view of Brighton than initially
he had felt for the place.

He wrote to a friend, the archdeacon John Fisher, in August 1824: I am living here but I dislike
the place Brighton is the receptacle of the fashion and oscouring of London. The
magnicence of the sea and its (to use your beautiful expression) everlasting voice is drowned
in the din & lost in the tumult of stagecoaches gigs ys etc and the beach is Piccadilly (that
part of it where we dined) by the seaside.

The research for the exhibition has identied several of the sites of Constables Brighton
paintings and drawings, and relocated one work, known as Houses in Hampstead, to the

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narrow road behind his lodgings, now full of the back doors of shops and cafes but still
recognisable.

Other works were rmly attributed to the artist, after Harrap, Lancaster and Anne Lyles, a
Constable expert, traced the sequence of the dazzling oil sketches he made on the spot, by
following the tracks of his long walks, starting at their front doors and turning down towards
the sea or up the hill and on to the downs.

Harrap particularly loves one little picture with tiny gures of Constables wife and children
walking through golden elds towards a distant church; the elds are all houses now, but it is
the walk Harrap does every day taking his children to school.

Study of the Trunk of an Elm Tree, c1821 28, John Constable.

Photograph: PR

Constable went to Brighton because fresh air was the only remedy doctors could suggest for his
Marias tuberculosis. Some have seen his anxiety over her health in Constables doomy skies in
many of his views though Lancaster said Marias health did greatly improve in Brighton until
the very end.

Maria died in the winter of 1828, leaving Constable with seven children, only a few weeks after
their last return from Brighton. The exhibition also includes a collection of small studies of
dock leaves he brought back to her room, and painted by her bedside. You can see them
withering and falling apart before your eyes, Harrap said, life and death, its all there.

Constable and Brighton, Brighton Museum & Art Gallery, 8 April 8 October 2017
Topics
John Constable
Art/Brighton/Museums/Heritage/news

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