Constable on sea

John Constable was, as we say these days, conflicted about Brighton. On the one hand, as he wrote in a letter, he was revolted by this marine Piccadilly, populated with: ‘ladies dressed & undressed — gentlemen in morning gowns and slippers on, or without them altogether about knee deep in the breakers — footmen — children — nursery maids, dogs, boys, fishermen’, all mixed together ‘in endless and indecent confusion’.

On the other, as a brilliantly conceived little exhibition at the Brighton Museum & Art Gallery makes clear, the town was one of a small number of locations that were crucial to his art. He went there, however, not because of the warm friendships that took him to Salisbury or the childhood memories and associations that made the landscape around East Bergholt — for him — charged with emotion, but because of his wife Maria’s weak chest.

The sea air of Brighton was considered better for invalids than smoggy Regency London, choked with coal smoke.