Jonathan Mane-Wheoki, Te Papa’s Director Art and Collection Services, looks at how Constable, arguably the most brilliant of all English landscape painters, has been viewed in New Zealand.

The only previous exhibition of John Constable’s work in New Zealand was shown in Auckland more than thirty years ago. Since then the man and his art have all but faded from the cultural consciousness of Päkehä New Zealanders.

But for the generation of Anglophiles who grew up in New Zealand between 1953 and 1973, Constable’s The Hay Wain probably ranked second only to the household portrait of the young Queen Elizabeth II in their affections. Images of this, and other works by Constable, formed their idea and ideal of the English landscape, and embodied memories of ‘home’.

The scenes Constable painted in the Stour Valley, Suffolk, which New Zealanders had known mostly from reproductions, became nostalgic sites of pilgrimage for many returning to the ‘mother country’. In1930, Frances Hodgkins was actually given the use of a studio in Flatford Mill, which had been owned by Constable’s father. Olivia Spencer-Bower painted views of the mill and Willy Lott’s cottage (famously depicted in The Hay Wain) in the 1960s.

Constable’s reputation as an artist only began to burgeon half a century after his death in 1837. Even then New Zealand painters were only vaguely aware of his achievement since they lacked opportunities to study major examples of his works at first hand.

Toss Woollaston’s first encounter with Constable’s art in the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne in 1958 proved revelatory for the freshness of paint application and sparkle in the English painter’s landscapes. But it was only through exposure to collections in the National Gallery, Victoria and Albert Museum, and Tate Gallery in London that New Zealanders could really grasp the measure of his greatness.

Opportunities to see Constable’s works at first hand in New Zealand have occurred very infrequently. The first was probably at the British Empire Loan Collection, an exhibition held to celebrate the opening of the National Art Gallery in Wellington in 1936. This featured Constable’s The Glebe Farm, and the Tate Gallery has again allowed the painting to be shown in Wellington.

Modest examples of the artist’s work have entered public collections in New Zealand. Brighton Beach, about1824 6, was bequeathed to the Dunedin Public Art Gallery in 1943. The watercolour painting of The Castle Rock, Borrowdale, 1806, was purchased in 1957 for the National Art Gallery, now absorbed into the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, with Harold Beauchamp Collection Funds. (Both paintings are included in the current exhibition.)

Beauchamp, Katherine Mansfield’s father, was proud of his grandfather John Beauchamp’s acquaintance with the artist. It is quite possible that Mansfield’s great grandfather would have known Constable’s uncle, John Watt, a midshipman on board the Resolution on the third voyage to New Zealand under the command of Captain James Cook.

John Constable: Impressions of Land, Sea and Sky provides New Zealanders with an extremely rare opportunity to reconnect with an artist who was arguably the most brilliant of all English landscape painters. His fresh and sparkling works were at one time regarded as the epitome of ‘Englishness’ and, as such, were central to the identity of many Päkehä New Zealanders.