The Masterpieces from World Museums in the Hermitage series
John Constable, Mill of Gillingham, Dorset and George Stubbs, Turf, with jockey up, at Newmarket
21 June, 2002 - 21 September, 2002

To mark the reopening after restoration of the halls of British art, an exhibition has been organized (in Hall 288) of paintings by two outstanding British artists George Stubbs and John Constable. The Yale Center for the Study of British Art in New Haven presents Turf, with jockey up by Stubbs and Mill of Gillingham by Constable. The choice of these particular works is no coincidence. The choice of these particular works is no coincidence: works by these two great artists are lacking in the Hermitage collection.
Stubbs's celebrated canvas Turf, with jockey up (circa 1765) belongs to the genre known as sporting painting, a specifically English phenomenon. The breeding of thoroughbred horses, as well as racing, hunting and shooting, produced the natural desire to be recorded riding or standing alongside a noble steed, simply to have a ''portrait'' of a favourite animal. The leading figure in this distinctive field of art in 18th-century Britain was George Stubbs (1724-1806). In his works he strove after greater veracity in the depiction of animals, among whom horses took pride of place.
Turf, with jockey up, at Newmarket, was painted for Frederick St. John, 2nd Viscount Bollingbroke, one of Stubbs's most important patrons and customers. The painting is typical of the artist's work in the 1760s and 1770s. He depicts the horse's stance and musculature with the precision of an anatomist. Yet at the same time he depicts the deliberately deserted landscape with amazing artistic subtlety and his inherent sense of colour and compositional harmony. A low landscape leaves the greater part of the canvas to the bright area of the sky, against which background the horse is turned side on, an angle that allows Stubbs to invest the depiction of the animal with an almost relief-like monumentality.
Like Stubbs, John Constable (1776-1806) learnt his art chiefly from nature. His preference was for simple subjects and his work differed greatly from what contemporaries were used to. The artist rejected the customary ''stage-set'' construction of the landscape and banished from his paintings the brown tone that had been an invariable feature of his predecessors' work. Untiring observation of colour relations and a scientific approach to understanding the nature of sunlight transformed the colour scheme of Constable's works and influenced European art as a whole.
Constable discovered early in his career the significance of the study from real life, and the freshness and immediacy of the study is preserved in many of his finished works. This applies in full measure to Mill of Gillingham, Dorset (1825-26). Besides this version, there are two other depictions by Constable of that same Dorset mill (one is in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the other in the Fitzwilliam Museum). All three are very similar, differing only in details. Constable was an artist who often repeated not only the same favourite motifs of familiar places, but the same subjects, introducing only minor changes. The painting that has arrived in the Hermitage was commissioned by a Mrs Hand. The diary that Constable kept in 1824 records that on 15 July that lady came by to ask about a little painting with Gillingham Mill. He was only able to meet the order a few months later, at which time he wrote to his clergyman friend Fisher that in it he had produced his finest picture. By an irony of fate the natural simplicity and open-air quality of Constable's work was first appreciated not in his homeland, but in France. The paintings by him exhibited at the 1824 Salon had a great influence on contemporary French artists.

Turf, with jockey up, at Newmarket
George Stubbs
Larger view

Mill of Gillingham. Dorset
John Constable
Larger view