Moody blues
Dark, brooding and aggressively expressionist, this is a world away from the cosy English image of Constable, the souvenir-shop favourite. The setting is the beach at Brighton, where the artist’s wife, Maria, had been sent to take the sea air to improve her tuberculosis. However, that raging ink-black storm looks anything but a tonic.
Liquid sky
By the time he created this sketch, Constable had been “skying”, that is, caught up in a passion for cloudscapes, for a few years. In 1822, he had made many studies in oil of the skies over Hampstead.
Aerial shot
This was made fast, in a spell where he’d take to the beach and work with paper pinned to the lid of the paint box in his lap.
Clouded judgment
Constable lamented that Brighton was a kind of Piccadilly-on-Sea, a seaside encampment for London’s fashionable set. But you’d never know that from this work. Its black streak of sea and rain that falls like deadly bolts of gloom suggests the inner landscape of a troubled mind.
Part of Constable and Brighton, Brighton Museum & Art Gallery, to 8 October
