What made Constable different from the majority of his contemporaries was his attitude towards the things that he saw. He was not, like so many other landscape artists, a conscious seeker of the picturesque. As an artist he was virtually self-taught and his periods of formal study amounted to little more than process of directive discipline. His real master was his own sensitive and perceptive eye Peacock, 15. It was through a study of nature rather than by a study of academic principles that his artistic philosophy was evolved. It was at East Bergholt on the Suffolk side of the...
an apparently spontaneous use of color and rapid brushstrokes he was able to capture the fleeting mood of a scene Phaidon, 105. Behind these speckled bits of paint, however, lies a carefully composed structure. John did not even seems to tell a story line with his pieces, yet only tried to stir up the familiar. Constable is sometimes referred to as a pantheist. Truth to nature is all needed in Constable country, and Constable, without worrying over semantic problems as to just what is truth is, captured it by painting what he saw in terms of what he felt.