by Jon Lackman | 22 June 2006 | Conservation, Modern
From The Independent: “The sweeping panorama of foreboding skies and the bustling life of Brighton’s grand seafront is a tour de force that took John Constable months of careful refining. Yet after he had finished, Britain’s greatest landscape painter stood back, admired his work, and took a knife to it. New research has revealed for the first time that Constable sliced off key details from his renowned work Chain Pier, Brighton … to make the painting more saleable … [Conservator Sarah] Cove said the drastic alteration in size was likely to have made it more manageable for any potential buyer. ‘It is very large, and if you think about the houses of his clients, they weren’t aristocrats living in stately homes,’ she said. Also, ‘The way he used his palette knife was considered to be very avant-garde and people hadn’t really seen that sort of thing in an exhibited work. This is 50,60 years before the Impressionists, and it may be that which made it unsaleable. People expected perfect brush strokes.’”
