Constable as a Voyage of Discovery

Abstract

C. R. Leslie’s influential biography of John Constable highlighted that his friend’s artistic strengths stemmed from his unprecedented geographical “confinement.” The unpublished draft preface, however, compared Constable with a “voyage of discovery.” Attending to Leslie’s conflicting images of confinement and remoteness enriches our understanding of how Constable’s rhetorical preoccupation with the local was a response to his place within expanding global artistic, social, and economic networks. His conception of the English landscape was constructed against a background of exploration, colonization, and international commercial expansion, the negotiation of these realities animating his paintings, prints, and public theorizing.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 C. R. Leslie, Memoirs of the Life of John Constable (London: Phaidon, 1951), 286.

2 Leslie, Memoirs, 285.

3 John Reynolds, “Review of English Landscape Scenery,” Athenaeum, June 26, 1830, in Judy Crosby Ivy, Constable and the Critics, 1802–1837 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 1991), 142.

4 “B. I. Review,” Champion, March 7, 1819, 156, in Ivy, Constable and the Critics, 80.

5 Richard and Samuel Redgrave, A Century of Painters of the English School, vol. 2 (London: Smith, Elder, 1866), 382.

6 On Constable and English identity, see Elizabeth Helsinger, “Constable: The Making of a National Painter,” Critical Inquiry 15, no. 2 (1989): 253–79; Stephen Daniels, Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 200–42; and Michael Rosenthal, “Constable and Englishness,” British Art Journal 7, no. 3 (Winter 2006–7): 40–45.

7 See Andrew Hemingway, Landscape Imagery and Urban Culture in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 8.

8 On the mutually constituting relationships between the metropolitan center and the global periphery in the first half of the nineteenth century, see Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830–1867 (Cambridge: Polity, 2002); and Antoinette Burton, ed., After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).

9 Tim Barringer, Douglas Fordham, and Geoff Quilley, eds., “Introduction,” in Art and the British Empire, ed. Barringer, Fordham, and Quilley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 3. For more recent studies, see Richard Johns, “There’s No Such Thing as British Art,” British Art Studies 1 (2015), https://doi.org/10.17658/issn.2058-5462/issue-01/conversation; Barringer, “Landscape Then and Now,” British Art Studies 10 (2018), https://doi.org/10.17658/issn.2058-5462/issue-10/tbarringer; Charlene Villaseñor Black and Barringer, “Decolonizing Art and Empire,” Art Bulletin 104, no. 1 (March 2022): 6–20; and Imogen Hart and Dorothy Price, “‘The Centre Is Nowhere’: British Art and the Global,” Art History 45, no. 3 (June 2022): 454–70.

10 Leslie Parris, Conal Shields, and Ian Fleming-Williams, eds., John Constable, Further Documents and Correspondence (Ipswich: Suffolk Records Society, 1975), 250.

11 Barbara Maria Stafford, Voyage into Substance: Art, Science, Nature, and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760–1840 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), 445; and Bernard Smith, Imagining the Pacific in the Wake of the Cook Voyages (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1992), 51.

12 Letter to John Dunthorne, ca. 1799, in R. B. Beckett, ed., John Constable’s Correspondence, 6 vols. (Ipswich: Suffolk Records Society, 1962–78), vol. 2, 24.

13 James Cook and James King, A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean, 3 vols. (London: G. Nicol, 1784), vol. 3, 46.

14 As transcribed in The Journals of Captain James Cook on His Voyages of Discovery, vol. 3, pt. 1: The Voyage of the Resolution and Discovery, 1776–1780, ed. J. C. Beaglehole (London: Routledge, 2017), 562.

15 Harriet Guest, Empire, Barbarism, and Civilisation: Captain Cook, William Hodges and the Return to the Pacific (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 10.

16 Cook and King, Voyage, 1:5. On visual material resulting from this voyage, see Rüdiger Joppien and Bernard Smith, The Art of Captain Cook’s Voyages: The Voyage of the Resolution and the Discovery, 1776–1780 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988).

17 Smith, Imagining the Pacific, 76.

18 Frederic Shoberl, Beauties of England and Wales; Or, Original Delineations, Topographical, Historical, and Descriptive, of Each County, vol. 14 (London: Harris, Longman, 1813), 225.

19 Smith, Imagining the Pacific, 193.

20 Reginald Heber, Narrative of a Journey through the Provinces of India from Calcutta to Bombay, 1824–1825, 3 vols (London: John Murray, 1828), vol. 1, 70.

21 On the picturesque and the construction of the exotic, see Ian McLean, “The Expanded Field of the Picturesque: Contested Identities and Empire in Sydney-Cove 1794,” in Art and the British Empire, ed. Barringer, Quilley, and Armstrong, 23–37; and Romita Ray, Under the Banyan Tree: Relocating the Picturesque in British India (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012).

22 See Inga Clendinnen, Dancing with Strangers: Europeans and Australians at First Contact (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

23 Arthur Phillip, The Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay (London: J. Stockdale, 1789).

24 Ibid., 285–86.

25 P. G. Fidlon and R. J. Ryan, eds., The Journal of Arthur Bowes Smyth: Surgeon, Lady Penrhyn, 1787–1789 (Sydney: Australian Documents Library, 1979), 86. See also Rhys Richards, “The Easternmost Route to China, 1787–1792: Part II,” Great Circle 8, no. 2 (October 1986): 106.

26 On Watts’s drawings in relation to the visual culture of the First Fleet, see Bernard Smith and Alwyne Wheeler, eds., The Art of the First Fleet and other Early Australian Drawings (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 102.

27 Letter from Mary Constable, December 9, 1807, in Beckett, John Constable’s Correspondence, 1:23.

28 Patrick Conner, “Spoilum,” Grove Art Online (2003), https://doi.org/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.article.T080650. On the portrait of Watts, see Conner, The China Trade, 1600–1860 (Brighton, UK: Royal Pavilion, Art Gallery and Museums, 1986), 51–52. On Spoilum, see Carl L. Crossman, The Decorative Arts of the China Trade: Paintings, Furnishings and Exotic Curiosities (Woodbridge, UK: Antique Collectors Club, 1991), 35–37.

29 1801 obituary notice in Naval Chronicle, in Beckett, John Constable’s Correspondence, 1:15.

30 Letter to Golding Constable, August 11, 1796, in Beckett, John Constable’s Correspondence, 1:12.

31 Letter to Leslie, June 1833, in Beckett, John Constable’s Correspondence, 3:104 (emphasis in original).

32 J. C. Beaglehole, The Life of Captain James Cook (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1974), 61.

33 Letter to Fisher, October 23, 1821, in Beckett, John Constable’s Correspondence, 6:78.

34 Juvenile Introduction to History; Or, Historical Beauties for Youth (London: Darton, 1790).

35 Jan Huygen van Linschoten, Voyage of John Huyghen van Linschoten to the East Indies, ed. P. A. Tiele, vol. 2 (Farnham, UK: Ashagate, 2010), 181.

36 Ernst van den Boogaart, Civil and Corrupt Asia: Images and Text in the Itinerario and the Icones of Jan Huygen Van Linschoten (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 1.

37 On the play between word and image in Itinerario, see ibid.

38 Geoffrey Quilley, Empire to Nation: Art, History and the Visualization of Maritime Britain, 1768–1829 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 7.

39 Graham Reynolds, The Early Paintings and Drawings of John Constable, vol. 1, Text (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 3.

40 See undated letter to Smith, 1797, in Beckett, John Constable’s Correspondence, 2:8.

41 John Thomas Smith, Remarks on Rural Scenery (London: self-pub., 1797), 12 (emphasis in original).

42 Ipswich Journal, March 20, 1802, quoted in Michael Rosenthal, Constable: The Painter and His Landscape (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 12.

43 Susan Thorne, “‘The Conversion of Englishmen and the Conversion of the World Inseparable’: Missionary Imperialism and the Language of Class in Early Industrial Britain,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 238.

44 Quoted in Guest, Empire, 12.

45 Ibid., 13.

46 Smith, Remarks on Rural Scenery, 12 (emphasis in original).

47 The Exhibition of the Royal Academy, 1806: The Thirty-Eighth (London: Royal Academy, 1806), 30. Constable’s title is confusing; Hardy was flag captain of Victory, whereas Eliab Harvey captained HMS Temeraire.

48 On the battle, see William M. James, The Naval History of Great Britain, vol. 3, 1800–1805 (London: Richard Bentley, 1886), 249–54.

49 Greg Smith, The Emergence of the Professional Watercolourist: Contentions and Alliances in the Artistic Domain, 1760–1824 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002), 206–8.

50 Reynolds, Early Paintings and Drawings, 114; and Rosenthal, Constable: The Painter, 101.

51 Letter to Maria Bicknell, June 5, 1814, in Beckett, John Constable’s Correspondence, 2:125.

52 Letter to Maria Bicknell, June 30, 1813, in Beckett, John Constable’s Correspondence, 2:110.

53 Charlotte Klonk, Science and the Perception of Nature: British Landscape Art in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 3. See also Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 152–53.

54 Smith, Imagining the Pacific, 76. See also Stafford, Voyage into Substance, 445.

55 Bernard Smith, Style, Information and Image in the Art of Cook’s Voyages (Christchurch, New Zealand: School of Fine Arts, University of Canterbury, 1988), n.p.

56 See Louis Hawes, “Constable’s Hadleigh Castle and British Romantic Ruin Painting,” Art Bulletin 65, no. 3 (September 1983): 456–57.

57 William Vaughan, “Constable’s Englishness,” Oxford Art Journal 19, no. 2 (1996): 17, 26.

58 Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology, 149.

59 On Constable’s print project, see Andrew Shirley, The Published Mezzotints of David Lucas after John Constable, R.A. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930); Judy Crosby Ivy, “Reading Mezzotints: Mr. Constable’s English Landscape,” Journal of Printing Historical Society 25 (1996): 74–95; Juilee Decker, “The Possibilities of Print: John Constable, English Landscape, and the Chiaroscuro of Nature” (PhD diss, Case Western Reserve University, 2003); and Felicity Myrone, “Introductions to John Constable’s ‘English Landscape,’” Print Quarterly 24, no. 3 (September 2007): 273–77. On the lectures, see R. B. Beckett, ed., John Constable’s Discourses (Ipswich: Suffolk Records Society, 1970), 28–74; and Leslie, Memoirs, 289–331.

60 On Constable’s interest in geology, see Beckett, John Constable’s Correspondence, 5:194. For a summary of relevant literature on meteorology, see Nicholas Robbins, “John Constable, Luke Howard, and the Aesthetics of Climate,” Art Bulletin 103, no. 2 (June 2021): 72n7.

61 Stephen Daniels, “‘No Continuing City’: John Constable, John Britton and Views of Urban History,” Tate Papers 33 (2020), https://www.tate.org.uk/research/tate-papers/33/no-continuing-city-john-constable-john-britton-views-urban-history. On the literary sources of the letterpress, see also Ivy, “Reading Mezzotints,” 74–95; and Decker, “The Possibilities of Print.”

62 Beckett, John Constable’s Discourses, 10.

63 Letter from Fisher, April 10, 1825, in Beckett, John Constable’s Correspondence, 6:199 (I give the quotation as Beckett transcribes Fisher; there are minor inconsistencies with Turner’s original, and all emphases are Fisher’s). See also Sharon Turner, The History of England during the Middle Ages, 3 vols. (London: Longman et al., 1814), vol. 1, 424.

64 Beckett, John Constable’s Discourses, 24 (emphasis added).

65 Smith, Remarks on Rural Scenery, 10, 15.

66 Beckett, John Constable’s Discourses, 14.

67 Turner, History of England, 1:427.

68 Beckett, John Constable’s Discourses, 9.

69 Decker, “Possibilities of Print,” 127.

70 On Constable and Britton, see Beckett, John Constable’s Correspondence, 5:82–86; and Daniels, “‘No Continuing City.’”

71 See Vaughan, “Constable’s Englishness,” 24.

72 John Britton, The Beauties of England and Wales; Or, Original Delineations, Topographical, Historical, and Descriptive, of Each County, vol. 15 (London: Longman et al., 1814), 87–88.

73 On the impact of political reform on the English Landscape, see Rosenthal, Constable: The Painter, 230–34; and Daniels, “‘No Continuing City.’”

74 Joseph Farington, The Farington Diary, ed. James Greig, 7 vols. (London: Hutchinson, 1922–28), vol. 5, 78.

75 See Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology, 125.

76 Letter to David Lucas, October 2, 1832, in Beckett, John Constable’s Correspondence, 4:382.

77 Beckett, John Constable’s Discourses, 26.

78 William Mason, The English Garden (York, UK: A. Ward, 1783), 16–17.

79 Beckett, John Constable’s Discourses, 24.

80 Beckett, John Constable’s Discourses, 24.

81 Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, The Maid’s Tragedy, in The Dramatick Works of Mr. Francis Beaumont and Mr. John Fletcher, vol. 1 (London: T. Sherlock, 1778), 39.

82 William Angus Knight, ed., Memorials of Coleorton: Being Letters from Coleridge, Wordsworth and His Sister, Southey, and Sir Walter Scott to Sir George and Lady Beaumont of Coleorton, Leicestershire, 1803 to 1834, vol. 1 (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1887), xxxi.

83 “Parry’s Expedition,” New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal 1 (January–June 1821), 725.

84 Letter from Fisher, January 26, 1830, in Beckett, John Constable’s Correspondence, 6:256. Constable proudly noted that Parry had been instructed in navigation by the father of the tutor of Constable’s own children, Charles Boner; see Letter to Leslie, August 16, 1833, in Beckett, John Constable’s Correspondence, 3:105.

85 Parris, Shields, and Fleming-Williams, John Constable, Further Documents, 24, 12, 16.

86 Harriet Guest, “The Great Distinction: Figures of the Exotic in the Work of William Hodges,” Oxford Art Journal 12, no. 2, (1989): 36. On Hodges’s relationship with India, see also Natasha Eaton, “Hodges’s Visual Genealogy for Colonial India, 1780–95,” in William Hodges, 1744–1797: The Art of Exploration, ed. Geoff Quilley and John Bonehill (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 35–41.

87 Geoff Quilley, “William Hodges, Artist of Empire,” in William Hodges, 1744–1797: The Art of Exploration, ed. Geoff Quilley and John Bonehill (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 1.

88 Beckett, John Constable’s Discourses, 65 (emphasis in the original).

89 Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Robert Wark (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 69. On objections to the “false beauty” of the local in Reynolds’s age and the motivation for English art in the early decades of the nineteenth century to move beyond a generalizing aesthetic to allow a “particular ideal of English ‘character,’” see Kay Dian Kriz, The Idea of the English Landscape Painter: Genius as Alibi in the Early Nineteenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 11–12.

90 Beckett, John Constable’s Discourses, 65.

91 Tom Tell-Troath (written 1621, printed 1622), quoted in Hugh Dunthorne, Britain and the Dutch Revolt, 1560–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 112.

92 John E. Crowley, Imperial Landscapes: Britain’s Global Visual Culture, 1745–1820 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 29–31. See also Smith, Imagining the Pacific, 18–20; and Liza Oliver, “Frans Post’s Brazil: Fractures in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Colonial Landscape Paintings,” Dutch Crossing 37, no. 3 (2013): 198–219.

93 Crowley, Imperial Landscapes, 29–31.

94 Quilley, “William Hodges,” 1. On the picturesque in relation to Hodges, see Giles Tillotson, The Artificial Empire: The Indian Landscapes of William Hodges (Richmond, UK: Curzon Press, 2000); and Ray, Under the Banyan Tree, esp. 31–35.

95 See Malcolm Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760–1800 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989); Daniels, Fields of Vision; and Jason Wood and John Walton, eds., The Making of a Cultural Landscape: The English Lake District as Tourist Destination, 1750–2010 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013).

96 John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

97 Anna Arabindan-Kesson, “Transmission and Transfer: Plantation Imagery and Medical Management in the British Empire,” Art History 45, no. 3 (June 2022): 474. See also McLean, “Expanded Field of the Picturesque.”

98 Arabindan-Kesson, “Plantation Imagery,” 473. See also Ray, Under the Banyan Tree, 6.

99 Douglas Fordham, Aquatint Worlds: Travel, Print, and Empire, 1770–1820 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 249.

100 Parris, Shields, Fleming-Williams, John Constable, Further Documents, 47.

101 “Constable’s Second Draft Prospectus,” in Beckett, John Constable’s Discourses, 83.

102 Ibid., 83.

103 Robbins, “John Constable, Luke Howard,” 64.

104 Beckett, John Constable’s Discourses, 10.

105 Leslie, Memoirs, 279.

106 Letter to Fisher, November 19, 1825, in Beckett, John Constable’s Correspondence, 6:207. On this composition’s development, see Joshua Reynolds, Later Paintings and Drawings of John Constable (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 233–34.

107 Leslie, Memoirs, 237.

108 Mark Evans, “Sources: ‘We Challenge the Dutch Masters to Shew Us Any Thing Better Than This,’” in Evans, Constable: The Making of a Master (London: V&A Publishing, 2014), 166. On the history, mediation, and influence of Canaletto’s canvas, see Charles Beddington, Canaletto in England: A Venetian Artist Abroad, 1746–1765 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 62–63.

109 Phillip, Voyage, 272.

110 Robbins, “John Constable, Luke Howard,” 70.

111 See Beckett, John Constable’s Correspondence, 1:128; drawing dated September 28, 1814, on which see Beckett, John Constable’s Correspondence, 2:133.

112 See A View of the City of Benares, Yale Center for British Art, B1978.43.1784V.

113 Leslie, Memoirs, 282. See also John E. Thornes, John Constable’s Skies: A Fusion of Art and Science (Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press, 1999), 88, 142.

114 William Hodges, Travels in India, 2nd ed. (London, 1794), iii.

115 Quoted in Fordham, Aquatint Worlds, 56.

116 Heber, Narrative, 1:257, 1:251, 1:254.

117 Ibid., 1:177.

118 Letter to Fisher, November 19, 1825, in Beckett, John Constable’s Correspondence, 6:207.

119 Hodges, Travels in India, 135.

120 Letter to Lucas, undated 1830, in Beckett, John Constable’s Correspondence, 4:336.

121 Rosenthal, Constable: The Painter, 229–30.

122 Letter to William Purton, July 29, 1834, in Beckett, John Constable’s Correspondence, 5:42.

123 Beckett, John Constable’s Discourses, 4.

124 This develops suggestions in Damian Taylor, “‘As If Every Particle Was Alive’: The Charged Canvas of Constable’s Hadleigh Castle,” British Art Studies 8 (2018), https://doi.org/10.17658/issn.2058-5462/issue-08/dtaylor.

125 Note dated November 10, 1835, in Beckett, John Constable’s Correspondence, 5:194. See Thomas Forster, Researches in Atmospheric Phaenomena, 2nd ed. (London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1815), 188–89.

126 Forster, Researches, 30. For Constable’s annotations, see Parris, Shields, Fleming-Williams, John Constable, Further Documents, 44–45.

127 John Herschel, A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (London: Longman et al., 1830), 239.

128 Ibid., 328.

129 Ibid., 259 (emphasis in original).

130 James Hutton, “Theory of the Earth,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 1 (1788–89): 209.

131 Library of Fine Arts, June 1, 1831, 421, quoted in Ivy, Constable and the Critics, 152.

132 “Fourth Royal Institution Lecture: Decline and Revival of Landscape,” quoted in Leslie, Memoirs, 323.

133 “Third Royal Institution Lecture: The Dutch and Flemish Schools,” quoted in Leslie, Memoirs, 318 (emphasis in original).

134 Library of Fine Arts, June 1, 1831, 421, in Ivy, Constable and the Critics, 152.

135 Metropolitan, June 1, 1831, 70, in Ivy, Constable and the Critics, 153.

136 On Turner’s influence on British art, see Sam Smiles, The Image of Antiquity: Ancient Britain and the Romantic Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994).

137 Beckett, John Constable’s Discourses, 25.

138 Turner’s advocacy of British colonial expansion became explicit in the preface to the 1836 edition of History of the Anglo-Saxons, although it is implicit in earlier editions. See Vaughan, “Constable’s Englishness,” 24. On colonialist uses of Turner’s Histories, see Donna Beth Ellard, “Ella’s Bloody Eagle: Sharon Turner’s History of the Anglo-Saxons and Anglo-Saxon History,” Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 5, no. 2 (2014): 215–34; and Leigh Boucher, “Victorian Liberalism and the Effect of Sovereignty: A View from the Settler Periphery,” History Australia 13, no. 1 (2016): 45.

139 On the absence of a rainbow, see Amy Concannon, “The Painting,” in “In Focus: Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows Exhibited 1831 by John Constable,” ed. Concannon Tate Research Publication (February 2017), https://www.tate.org.uk/research/in-focus/salisbury-cathedral-constable. On the meteorological inexactitude of the rainbow, see Paul Schweizer, “John Constable, Rainbow Science, and English Color Theory,” Art Bulletin 64, no. 3 (September 1982): 426.

140 On thinking within artistic practice, see Mara Ambrozic and Angela Vettese, eds, Art as a Thinking Process: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (Berlin: Sternberg, 2013); Elizabeth Fisher and Rebecca Fortnum, eds, On Not Knowing: How Artists Think (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2013); James D. Herbert, Brushstroke and Emergence: Courbet, Impressionism, Picasso (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); and Hanneke Grootenboer, The Pensive Image: Art as a Form of Thinking (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2020).

141 John Gage, “The Big Picture,” in Constable: The Great Landscapes, ed. Anne Lyles (London: Tate Publishing, 2006), 25.

142 Letter to Fisher, December 17, 1824, in Beckett, John Constable’s Correspondence, 6:185.

143 Carrie Noland, Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 2, 3. See also Andy Clark, “Gesture as Thought?,” in The Hand, an Organ of the Mind: What the Manual Tells the Mental, ed. Zdravko Radman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 255–68; and Herbert, Brushstroke and Emergence.

144 Letter to Leslie, January 21, 1829, in Beckett, John Constable’s Correspondence, 3:18.

145 Herbert, Brushstroke and Emergence, 102. See also Herbert, “Courbet, Incommensurate and Emergent,” Critical Inquiry 40, no. 2 (Winter 2014): 339–81.

146 Anthony Gardner and Charles Green, “Biennials of the South on the Edges of the Global,” Third Text 27, no. 4 (2013): 442.

147 Anthony Gardner and Charles Green, Biennials, Triennials, and documenta: The Exhibitions That Created Contemporary Art (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), web.

148 Ibid.

149 Letter to Fisher, May 8, 1824, in Beckett, John Constable’s Correspondence, 6:157.

150 See C. G. Constable and A. W. Stiffe, The Persian Gulf Pilot (London: Hydrographic Office, 1864).

151 Letter to John Charles Constable, in Beckett, John Constable’s Correspondence, 5:205.

152 Villaseñor Black and Barringer, “Decolonizing Art and Empire,” 17. See also Hart and Price, “The Centre Is Nowhere.”

153 Villaseñor Black and Barringer, “Decolonizing Art and Empire,” 17.

154 See, for instance, responses to “A Questionnaire on Decolonization,” October 174 (2020): 3–125; and Catherine Grant and Dorothy Price, “Decolonizing Art History,” Art History 43, no. 1 (2020): 8–66.

155 Sampada Aranke, “Muscle Memory,” in “A Questionnaire on Decolonization,” 9, 11.

156 Ibid., 10.

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Notes on contributors

Damian Taylor

Damian Taylor is an artist and currently a visiting tutor at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford. Alongside making art he is revising two book projects, one on disembodied hands and embodied thought, the other on Constable and boundaries [Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, OX1 4BG, UK, [email protected]].