CONSTABLE’S OIL SKETCHES 1809-29
Salander-O’Reilly Galleries

In 2004, Salander-O’Reilly Galleries presented a dazzling survey of John Constable’s oil sketches of clouds. Working in plein air, the British painter sought to capture nature’s most elusive motif with an inventive, improvisatory, yet erudite brush that kept pace with the mercurial shifts and inner logic of weather.

This new show casts a lower gaze, over landscape in general (although it includes a couple of cloud studies) with views of Constable’s favorite stomping grounds, from East Anglia to the Sussex Coast and Hampstead Heath. The show spans the earlier part of his career, named here “the Maria Bicknell years” for the sweetheart he would marry against her father’s opposition. After a painful seven-year courtship, he married her in 1816 only to lose her to tuberculosis in 1828. Many of the locales of his outdoor sketching were visited for Maria’s health. In the years before his death in 1837, Constable relied less on plein air observations, developing heavier, more invented “machines” in the studio. Usefully, the show includes “Dedham Mill” (1829), from a private collection: Technically a sketch, in that it is on paper, it is likely a studio work, and has the curious, rubbed-on impasto that characterized his later efforts.

As in the gallery’s earlier show of oil sketches, there are institutional loans, including works from London’s Tate Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and a handsome scholarly catalog. On this occasion, alas, the installation is seriously marred: Many of the works are on paper, so natural light is prohibited, but Constable’s level-headed empiricism gains nothing from melodramatic splashes of intense artificial light against somewhat lurid scarlet walls.

But this is a minor complaint when such a treat is in store: The flat, calmly modulated sketch “Dedham Vale for the East Bergholt to Flatford Lane” (1809–10), for instance, which anticipates Corot’s early work, on loan from the Victoria and Albert Museum; or the exquisitely perfunctory (yet precise) “Dedham Lock” (1820) from the Yale Center for British Art, in New Haven, Conn. Although Courbet and then the Impressionists were as inspired by Constable’s heavily worked studio compositions as these sketches, which only came to attention decades after his death, it is these much freer oil sketches that now make him seem like an early modernist. It is hard not to look at the large oak almost squirming in the turbulent sky in “Landscape, Suffolk” (1810–11), for instance, without thinking of Soutine.

Until June 16 (22 E. 71st St., between Fifth and Madison avenues, 212-879-6606).