Constable's Painting Room

In 1813  John Constable had moved into his house in Charlotte Street in London. He was in the process of redecorating his painting room. Note that he says "painting room" rather than studio. Constable writes in a letter to to describe how he wants the room to be painted. And what colour did he choose? White, the all purpose choice of today's artist? Or something else? Constable chose a purple brown colour.Constable was working in his own home. This was a normal practice at the time. He did not have a separate dedicated workshop such as many artists now have. One  can only guess at how he would react to the idea of a white cell such as many  artists accept/demand. I think that he would have found this depressing and emotionally chilly--and of a colour which does not suit his work.

...my front room where I paint shall be done with a sort of purple brown from the floor to the ceiling-not spareing even the doors or doorposts for white is disagreable to a painters Eyes-near  pictures-

(Letter to Maria Bicknell, 30 June, 1813 .Capitals, spelling etc are JC's own)


So Constable chose to work in a relatively low toned room. He specifically mentions that the woodwork-the door surrounds for example, are painted the same colour as the walls. They are not picked out in white or some contrasting colour.

He does not give his reasoning for this choice of colour.He surely thought that this colour scheme would not be too gloomy. Can we reconstruct/guess what these reasons might be? He may have thought that it would complement the silvery  colour schemes found often in his own work.And at the least it would not be distracting. The paintings would surely appear more luminous against this relatively low key background.White skirting boards and woodwork would have caught the eye.He surely wanted the flickering effects of his painterly touch to have no competition.

Constable's text quoted in : Constable the Art of Nature, The Tate Gallery, 1971. The organisers were L Parris and C Shields

COTMAN THROUGH THE CAMERA LUCIDA

John Sell Cotman as drawn by John Varley with a camera lucida.
Dated 1810.Yale Center for British Art

Anthony Vandyck Copley Fielding. Also drawn with the camera lucida. Same date and provenance
as the Cotman.

Artists do sometimes use mechanical devices in their work. One gadget  is the camera lucida which is a device that can be used in portraiture. Here are two drawings made by the British watercolourist John Varley. The he first bears an inscription which confirms that it was made with the cameras lucida. The other is so similar in style that  if the one was created with the device then the other must be too. Interestingly enought the subjects are both distinguished British watercolourists J S Cotman and Anthony Vandyck Copley Fielding. Both works are in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art.
The Cotman dawing in particular proves that male hairstyles are relatively unchanging.

The inscription on the front of the Cotman states "Johnny Cotman of Norwich",and on the back,"Mr John Sinclair Cotman/Done with the Camera Lucida/June 1810. (Varley gets Cotman's middle name wrong, it was Sell.) And it also appears that the camera lucida used was most likely that invented about this time by John Varley's brother Cornelius who certainly had strong scientific interests.For further information look here . And for information regarding scientific aspects try this site of the American Philosophical Society.Cornelius called his apparatus a Patent Graphic Telescope. He was an artist but worked mostly as a maker of scientific instruments.

The camera lucida is basically a prism fixed above a drawing board.To use it the artist normally sits at a table and looks into a prism at eye level. Then the artist traces what is seen in the prism -which appears to be on the paper which sits on the baseboard.

The quality of line is also a giveaway which suggest a kind of tracing or copying activity. If you look at the neckwear of the sitters you will see the clear and slightly perfunctory quality of line which is common in traced work.You can see a similar simplification in some of the drawings which Rodin made when he copied a work by holding it up against a pane of glass to allow tracing onto another sheet.

OX-GALL FOR WATERCOLOURS

Yes, that is just what it is, another traditional feature of the British watercolour tradition. And yes, in the past you could have sent someone round to the slaughterhouse to obtain enough to last a lifetime.It is also used by people who make marbled paper. But apart from this gory facet, why is it of use to a watercolourist?

If you use quality watercolour paper you will often find that it is difficult to cover the paper, difficult to spread your wash because the colour will not take and balls up into patches no matter what you do. Watercolour papers are often hard-sized so that the colour stays on the surface and maintains its brilliance.This is what ox-gall helps with. It is a water tension breaker or wetting agent.You can add some to your painting water and see what the results you get.It may only need a few drops.Available from reputable art stores, you don't need to go to the slaughterhouse.

CLOUD STUDIES-A TUTORIAL

Here are the stages in the making of a small watercolour exercise done to practise the visualisation of clouds, one of the hardest of subjects for an artist to imagine.Done on a sheet of watercolour paper with a slightly rough surface. Sometimes I lift  the dried watercolour with a wet brush-no colour.The blue shapes eventually define the white shapes of the clouds.

Haphazard dabs of very liquid blue watercolour

Dark blue starts to define clouds.Orange brown to represent land/horizon

Green band to represent another patch of land. it dries in a puddle with a hard edge. Some blending of sky at lower left.

Further work on the sky near the horizon  where the clouds are blurred by rubbing with brush loaded with clean water.

More blurring of clouds on the horizon and upper right with clean water. Land areas strengthened.

Trees are introduced and the horizon is strengthened.Clouds are blurred with a brush loaded with clean water

Trees are strengthened and some light ochre is added to the shadow sides of the clouds.The clouds are redefined a little at lower right.

Does Blue recede? Does red advance?

The Valley of Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland,
John Ruskin, watercolour, circa 1866. Metropolitan, New York.

Cliches get repeated from time to time. That is their nature. You will probably have heard the one which says that blue colours recede and red comes forward.It was evidently a commonplace in the C19 and it is still a commonplace now. But here is its demolition from the great Victorian art critic  John Ruskin. He was many things as well as an art critic but let us leave that for now. This comes from section 184 of The Elements of Drawing, a book which all artists who work from observation can read with profit. I have broken the text into paragraphs for easier reading. You can find the book at Project Gutenberg or quite cheaply in the Dover paperback facsimile.

 It is a favorite dogma among modern writers on color that "warm colours" (reds and yellows) "approach," or express nearness, and "cold colours" (blue and gray) "retire," or express distance. So far is this from being the case, that no expression of distance in the world is so great as that of the gold and orange in twilight sky. Colours, as such, are ABSOLUTELY inexpressive respecting distance. It is their quality (as depth, delicacy, etc.) which expresses distance, not their tint.

 A blue bandbox set on the same shelf with a yellow one will not look an inch farther off, but a red or orange cloud, in the upper sky, will always appear to be beyond a blue cloud close to us, as it is in reality. It is quite true that in certain objects, blue is a sign of distance; but that is not because blue is a retiring colour, but because the mist in the air is blue, and therefore any warm colour which has not strength of light enough to pierce the mist is lost or subdued in its blue: but blue is no more, on this account, a "retiring colour," than brown is a retiring colour, because, when stones are seen through brown water, the deeper they lie the browner they look; or than yellow is a retiring colour, because, when objects are seen through a London fog, the farther off they are the yellower they look. Neither blue, nor yellow, nor red, can have, as such, the smallest power of expressing either nearness or distance: they express them only under the peculiar circumstances which render them at the moment, or in that place, signs of nearness or distance. Thus, vivid orange in an orange is a sign of nearness, for if you put the orange a great way off, its colour will not look so bright; but vivid orange in sky is a sign of distance, because you cannot get the colour of orange in a cloud near you. So purple in a violet or a hyacinth is a sign of nearness, because the closer you look at them the more purple you see. But purple in a mountain is a sign of distance, because a mountain close to you is not purple, but green or gray.

 It may, indeed, be generally assumed that a tender or pale colour will more or less express distance, and a powerful or dark colour nearness; but even this is not always so. Heathery hills will usually give a pale and tender purple near, and an intense and dark purple far away; the rose colour of sunset on snow is pale on the snow at your feet, deep and full on the snow in the distance; and the green of a Swiss lake is pale in the clear waves on the beach, but intense as an emerald in the sunstreak six miles from shore. And in any case, when the foreground is in strong light, with much water about it, or white surface, casting intense reflections, all its colors may be perfectly delicate, pale, and faint; while the distance, when it is in shadow, may relieve the whole foreground with intense darks of purple, blue green, or ultramarine blue. So that, on the whole, it is quite hopeless and absurd to expect any help from laws of "aërial perspective." Look for the natural effects, and set them down as fully as you can, and as faithfully, and never alter a colour because it won't look in its right place. Put the colour strong, if it be strong, though far off; faint, if it be faint, though close to you. Why should you suppose that Nature always means you to know exactly how far one thing is from another? She certainly intends you always to enjoy her colouring, but she does not wish you always to measure her space. You would be hard put to it, every time you painted the sun setting, if you had to express his 95,000,000 miles of distance in "aërial perspective."