“The Embarkation of George the Fourth from Whitehall”, John Constable’s largest ever painting has recently been restored and is now available for public viewing at Anglesey Abbey. Those living in Great Britain can see a television documentary about this process on More 4. The painting itself, which is eight feet wide and 6 feet tall, was found in his studio after his death in 1837 and is now looked after by the National Trust. There has been a debate whether the work was actually intended for exhibition or whether the artist used it as a preparatory study for other paintings. Conservator Sarah Maisey spent 270 hours cleaning the painting and finally when the grime and varnish was removed, it showed Constable’s brushstrokes and glazes for the first time in nearly two hundred years.
Meanwhile Constable is due to travel to Romania in September. The tenth edition of Art Safari, which opens on the 23rd at Dacia-Romania Palace in Bucharest will show an exhibition dedicated to the art of English painter John Constable in its international pavilion. The exhibition entitled “Seeking Truth: The Art of John Constable”, is curated by Dr Emily Knight and Katharine Martin. It is organized by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Not to be outdone, The United States National Endowment for the Humanities has announced a $31.5 Million grant to Penn State University to use computational methods to analyse the clouds in landscapes by John Constable and to trace the adoption of his Realist techniques by other 19th-century European artists.