The White Horse

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The White Horse: John Constable

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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John Constable Oil Painting - The White Horse

Keywords: White, Horse

Work Overview: The White Horse
John Constable
1818-1819
oil on canvas
overall: 127 x 183 cm (50 x 72 1/16 in.)

The White Horse by John Constable (1776–1837) is a full-size oil sketch of one of the artist's first large-scale landscape paintings. The final version, now part of the Frick Collection in New York, was first exhibited in 1819 at the Royal Academy and was the beginning of a series of works that became famously known as the "six-footers" for their grand size. The scene is a view from the south bank of the River Stour in the countryside around Suffolk, England, where the artist was born. The barge in the lower left corner is carrying a horse from the towpath on the near side of the river to the opposite bank.

Hidden beneath this painting is a version of another Constable painting, Dedham Vale from the Coombs. The artist reused the canvas and painted over the scene to create the The White Horse sketch. The painting that is visible today was once obscured by paint added by someone other than Constable over a century ago, perhaps in an effort to make it look more finished. Through microscopic examinations, x-radiography, and painstaking analysis, expert conservators and scholars were able to decipher the multiple layers of paint on the canvas. The work was cleaned over a period of several years, from 1992 to 1997, and the lively and well-preserved Constable sketch was revealed.

In 1819, Constable exhibited the first of his monumental "six-footers," canvases which he hoped would attract attention. His previous works had been small compositions, now he wanted to enter the great tradition of European landscapes. Constable entitled this work, "A scene on the River Stour," but its first owner renamed the masterpiece, The White Horse. It shows a flat-barge crossing the river just below Flatford Mill, at a point where the tow-path switched sides. Two men are pushing against into the current with long poles, while in the aft of the boat the horse, which will be used to pull the boat, stands patiently.

This picture is a wonderful representation of the soggy lands of the Stour, the decaying houses, the hard-working inhabitants. Although another painter might have painted all this poverty as an indictment, as a failure, Constable celebrates it with joyful exhuberance. Look at that remarkable tree in the right center, growing on a tiny piece of land which is crumbling into the river. That tree has no right to be there, but it is flourishing! Critics have sometimes charged Constable with nostalgia, painting a world that was rapidly disappearing. But if so, it is gorgeous nostalgia.

John Constable (1776–1837) created landscapes that ranged from sketches with broad, loose strokes to highly polished and tightly rendered finished paintings. He would often arbitrarily end the painting process at any degree of finish in between. The four-by-six-foot painting The White Horse (1819), part of the Widener Collection at the National Gallery of Art, seemed to have been painted in one of these intermediate styles at the time of its donation in 1942.
Once considered a same-size second version of the highly finished The White Horse in the Frick Collection, New York City, the Widener White Horse showed a halfway degree of finish that became problematic in determining its attribution. If the painting had been more of a sketch, experts likely would have attributed it to Constable, because over the course of his career he had created nine four-by-six-foot paintings for the annual exhibition at the Royal Academy. For all but The White Horse, he had first created a full-size sketch. Because the Gallery's painting seemed more like a finished work than a sketch, and was somewhat awkwardly realized in a technique that did not really match any of those typically seen in Constable’s paintings, by 1977 scholars concluded that the painting was a lesser copy by another artist.

John Constable, The White Horse, 1818-1819
This is an image of the painting before cleaning. It shows how heavy and flat the trees and sky appeared. This awkwardness is not characteristic of Constable's sketches or of his finished paintings and demonstrates the reason the painting had been de-attributed from Constable before it was cleaned.

In 1984, the Constable expert Charles Rhyne asked National Gallery conservators to prepare an x-radiograph of the painting so that its layering structure could be studied. He and the conservators noticed a second, entirely different composition beneath the painting. It appeared that here Constable had first attempted a large version of Dedham Vale from the Coombs, a scene he had realized in small charcoal sketches and small paintings, such as the well known one in the Victoria and Albert Museum, but had never painted on a large scale. For some reason, Constable abandoned this subject and reused the canvas to paint a version of The White Horse.

constable-during-treatment
This image illustrates the painting during cleaning. The central portion shows the repaint still in place but with the varnish removed, except in the brown/yellow rectangular area at the upper right of the central section where the discolored varnish is still in place. The areas at both side show the painting free of the overpaint and discolored old varnish. The loose and free quality of a Constable sketch is beginning to emerge.

Finding a known Constable composition underneath the painting was an indication that the artist had been involved in producing this canvas from the beginning, because it would have been extremely unlikely for a copyist or forger to first enlarge an obscure small work, then paint a copy of a different work over top. This revelation prompted a thorough scientific analysis of the layers of the painting in an effort to explain the discrepancy between its appearance and likely authorship. Analysis of a few, very tiny, samples of the paint, taken in cross-section, allowed all the layers to be studied under the microscope.
This examination revealed several layers of thick, resinous, nonoriginal paint that had been applied at some later date over much finer and more precise layers; a thick layer of varnish separated the two distinct types of layers. This analysis indicated that whatever was beneath the visible White Horse had been extensively repainted at a later date. Testing showed that it was possible to remove the overpaint layers to reveal the original Constable work beneath. After several years of painstaking work, the painting as it exists today was exposed and is now accepted by experts to be the missing White Horse sketch.

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John Constable

Work Overview