Susan Owens for Constable's Year

In celebration of the 250th anniversary of his birth, Susan Owens offers a nuanced understanding of the life and work of John Constable.

'A marvellous book' Ali Smith

As exhilarating as a lungful of oxygen: that's how some of his contemporaries felt about John Constable's paintings. Others were baffled by his uncompromisingly fresh and realistic treatment of the natural world. Owens traces the rhythms and resonances of the artist's year to offer a vivid, unconventional perspective on this beloved figure.

Whether in London in May, preparing pictures for exhibition and longing for the Suffolk spring, or painting boat-builders and waiting to be married in a gloomy September, Constable was shaped by the yearly cycles of weather and agriculture, as well as by the demands of the art world.

Though he is considered traditional, Constable was a radical. His sketchbooks and paintings reject second-hand, slip-shod versions of nature, instead subjecting the land, its people and industry to intense scrutiny; developing a new painting to fit the landscape he saw with his farmer's eye and felt beneath the soles of his boots. His was the approach of one who understood the countryside as a place of both labour and natural phenomena.

'In this extraordinary book Susan Owens draws a multidimensional portrait of Constable, bringing him alive not only biographically but also meteorologically and geographically in his love of the skies above and the work-a-day East Anglian landscape' Martin Gayford

Dr Susan Owens is an expert on British landscape art and a leading critical voice in the field. Her publications include The Story of Drawing, Apollo magazine's 2024 Book of the Year, Imagining England's Past and Spirit of Place. She was Curator of Paintings at the V&A and was involved in the major V&A exhibition and catalogue 'Constable: The Making of a Master'.