Late Constable Av Anne Lyles, Matthew Hargraves

<p><em>"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."</em> ¿ <strong>Jonathan Jones, Guardian</strong><br></p><p>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 <em>The Hay Wain</em> and <em>The Leaping Horse</em>, 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.</p><p>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