JOHN CONSTABLE

Born in a small village in Suffolk, on the east coast of England where marshy land and rivers cut through a gently ebbing, pastoral countryside, the painter John Constable never strayed far from his home. So affectionate was he to his native landscape, that even today the area around his village is known as ‘Constable Country’. Yet his ties to his home were, at least to his contemporaries understandings, detrimental to his career as they led him to reject opportunities that would move him elsewhere. History has proved Constable right for his decisions to stay close; the works he painted of verdant fields, glistening rivers, and aching trees revolutionised landscape painting with a return to composition from nature, rather than the imagination. Constable painted this view of Stoke-By-Nayland, the neighbouring village to the one he was born in, many times throughout his life. Almost always from the same angle, with the same trees in the foreground and the same church behind, a church he had painted the altarpiece for as a young man, that they serve as a biographical record of his life. It was a dedication and love for his homeland that led him to such repetition - “I should paint my own places best”, he said, “painting is but another word for feeling”.

GEORGIA O’KEEFFE

On her first visit to New Mexico in 1929, Georgia O’Keeffe would take long walks in the nighttime desert, and encounter mysterious crosses dotted throughout the landscape. Simple, folk objects; they became to her these strange spectres of religion in a land of arid nature, that they took on the form of a ‘thin dark veil of the Catholic Church’. These crosses were most likely placed by a Catholic lay brotherhood known as the Penitentes, marking the routes to their informal church like structures called moradas. Yet for O’Keeffe, they became something else entirely. “Painting the crosses”, she said, “was a way of painting the country”, and this is evident in their composition. Reducing these already simple objects to their most formal elements of shape and color, and magnifying them from there, she sets the cross against the surreal New Mexico background, its crossarm almost enforcing the horizon behind it. O’Keeffe would settle in New Mexico some 16 years after this first visit, and become amongst its most celebrated and famous daughters, but it was these early cross paintings that established her relationship with the state and her as a leading American modernist. 

DIEGO VELÁZQUEZ

The flesh of Christ is so alive, so exquisitely rendered in oil such that we can almost see the pores of his skin, as to cause devotion and reverence at the sheer sight of it. This was the intended effect. Velazquez was painting at the time of the Catholic Reformation where an enormous emphasis was placed on Transubstantiation and thus the body of Christ was seen as a symbol of rebellious Catholicism in the face of the rising Protestantism. Hired as a court painter of the Spanish King Phillip IV, who tolerated a slow pace of work because he saw that he was a once-in-a-generation genius, Velazquez moved more towards religious imagery and away from the historical work and portraiture that had made his name. The paintings made under this patronage are amongst his most famous and significant, using his immense technical skill and a deep understanding of the transformational power of art to create stirring works of holy ordinance that elevate history and allegory into something tangible.