The beautifully simple premise behind Ipswich Museum's 250 anniversary show is to eschew chronology in favour of geography. Although the exhibition focuses on works from the early part of Constable's career, it happily flits across time in order to remain rooted in space and take the viewer on a walk which starts at the artist's childhood home in East Bergholt and continues past Flatford Mill towards Dedham. The added joy, of course, is that you can exit the gallery and take the very same journey in reality through what is now marketed as Constable Country (and which, as quoted in the show, was already known as such during the artist's own lifetime). Constable is not getting quite the splash which greeted Turner's equivalent birthday last year: there are plenty of little exhibitions around but you have to seek them out. Suffolk, however, is gleefully celebrating their local lad and this is the central of three shows throughout the year. This has the added kudos of the borrowed Hay Wain, but even without that, there was a sense of excitement and bustle in the room. You sense that John Constable matters round here.
The full majesty of the Hay Wain, which can easily be overlooked within its normal National Gallery home, is wonderfully showcased in this more domestic setting. The shock of scale after a line of genteel watercolours and oil sketches gives a sense of the impact it must have made in the 1820s, particularly of course in Paris which embraced it in a way the Royal Academy did not. Its immersiveness, however, is not about size, so much as life. Constable's white dashes, later reduced in impact to become over-exaggerated 'snow', here create a sparkle of moisture and movement which you can almost hear as well as see in the flow of the river and the ripple of the leaves. The colour zings with sappy vibrance, all the more striking after the parched grass and premature autumnal leaves of the park outside. Everywhere is activity and interaction, from the much reused figures in the foreground, to the tiniest background dots half submerged in nature as they go about their tasks.
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Even behind its protective glass, this is a painting which draws you in and carries you away, to those half-remembered, half-imagined perfect summer days. What is so clever, though, is the way that its nostalgic grandeur is both reinforced and undermined by the smaller surrounding works. The scene itself was one revisited and repainted by Constable many, many times; explored in all seasons, at all times of day, familiar to the artist in a way it is hard to underestimate. These oil sketches have an honesty and an ordinariness which makes the Hay Wain look like the showy crowd-pleaser it was intended to be. Constable gets criticised for inauthenticity by the very people who praise Turner for exaggerating sun and storm. Worse, he is accused of gentrifying the countryside as if he could not see it but through the rose-tint of his class. Both miss the point. Constable could do reality but he knew that reality would not work on academy walls, and would not pay the bills.
Before all that, we begin in East Bergholt, with three drawings done as a wedding present for a family friend and the two wonderfully prosaic views of the Constable family's garden, painted for personal pleasure and kept by the artist throughout his life. Two small sunsets washed with a pinkish-purple haze are as lyrical as poems, their colour as intense as anything Turner produced. Views of East Bergholt church might also be seen through the lens of elegiac romanticism. But there is reality here also: Fen Lane with the harvesters working or the casual glimpse of a boy taking a drink which will later be reused with iconic effect in the Cornfield. Constable's determined observation led him to paint Boat Building entirely outdoors, and it remains a uniquely un-idealised record of rural-industrial labour.
The exhibition allows itself a couple of digressions. Cloud studies from Hampstead are included as they surely must be in any Constable show; and there are a handful of drawings, enough to remind us that he did travel elsewhere (Weymouth, Brighton). Generally, however, the curators follow their self imposed rules and we journey sedately through Dedham Vale, past Glebe Farm, Langham, the Coombs. There are surprises - a Valley Scene near East Bergholt is dense and green with trees - but the pleasure really lies in the familiarity. By the end of the show you recognise St Mary's Church or Dedham Lock as old friends, and (rather as in Gwen John's work currently on show in Edinburgh) the repetition highlights subtle differences rather than mundane similarity. You leave with a spring in your step, breathing fresh air and reminded of the simple joys of the English countryside. Bliss.
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