Constable: guard that heritage

At the remarkable hour of only 10.30 of a Saturday morning, Ms Baroque went to the Constable exhibition at Tate Britain, all the way over in Pimlico. I realise this is a surprising choice of viewing experience for me, and it was - I confess - mainly a vehicle for getting myself to the Hodgkin before it finishes - but it was wonderful to see the six big exhibition paintings. together with their remarkable full-size oil sketches.

There is something hard to see about Constable. Maybe it's those cheap prints they used to give away with petrol purchase, or the Christmas biscuit tins - which I now remember in association with a faint smell of gas, from the gas fire, and the sensation of stifling heat, because the idea back then always used to be to keep the door shut with the fire on full - meaning your face went red and your back was freezing against the unheated settee. Remember settees? They are why it's hard to see Constable. So off I trooped, taking care to procure a very millennial cappuccino along the way, in search of this man who painted these pictures. And did I find him? Well - sort of...

...and I did learn something about The Hay Wain which made me love it more - namely, that its original title was Landscape: Noon. This is far more painterly & less sentimental - and actually connected to the subject matter of the painting itself, in which the light shines on a field at the back, and not on the cart at the foreground.

At the end of the exhibition there is a case holding a painting palette, paintbox and brushes rescued from Constable's studio after his death. This element of process was introduced by the sketches, but underexplored by the exhibition as a whole, and then almost ignored when it came to interesting artefacts from his own hand. (The palette looks as if it would fit a right hand... was the man left-handed? Like Ms B herself? We wonder...) Altogether I never felt the exhibiton notes, commentary (sugary reading of an excerpt of Gray's Elegy, with background music, anyone?) or indeed merchandise (pastel tea towels and mugs) elevated the thing much above 'Constable, the Heritage Park'.

Only the paintings did it justice. You do want to jump into them, like Eustace Scrubb (a dangerously nostalgic feeling, typified by the Lewis reference).

The sketch for The Lock is completely wonderful. And of all the pictures, the one that surprises, after you see the sketch. There was also a painting of the pier at Brighton, of which I vastly preferred the fresh, lively sketch. In the final painting Constable darkened the whole sky and made the only sunlight in the picture shine on the new, modern, Regency promenade, leaving all the rustic toilers along the beach literally in the dark. Polemics, & tedious for it.

And when I came out the whole sky seemed completely different. The clouds looked heavy, with real weight, and were moving in ways that made them look alive. As Constable says, the sky is "the chief organ of sentiment" - which makes it just as important in real life as in the gallery - and for the rest of that afternoon the vista over the river, and over the grey buildings we hardly notice normally, was like a familiar face in new surroundings.