The artist John Constable, clouds, and Hampstead

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THE TATE BRITAIN art gallery in London is holding a special exhibition of the works of John Constable (1776-1837) and John Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) until 12 April 2026. Amongst the many magnificent paintings on display, there are several small paintings of clouds by Constable. I was particularly interested to see the cloud studies because I had written about them in my book “Beneath a Wide Sky: Hampstead and its Environs”. Here is an extract from my book. It deals with Constable and his interest in clouds:

“One of Hampstead’s attractions for Constable was its wide expanse of sky, which, as Barratt wrote, the artist:

‘… regarded as the keynote of landscape art, and so assiduously did he study cloud, sky, and atmosphere in the Hampstead days that Leslie, his biographer, was able to become possessed of twenty of these special studies, each dated and described. Constable was a man of Wordsworthian simplicity of character, fond of all things rural, and devotedly attached to birds and animals.’

The website of Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum reinforces what Barratt wrote:

‘While living at Hampstead, Constable made a series of oil sketches of the sky alone, each one marked with the date, time and a short description of the conditions. His interest in clouds was influenced partly by the work of the scientist Luke Howard, who had in 1803 written a pioneering study, classifying different types of cloud ...’

In ‘The Invention of Clouds’ by Richard Hamblyn, a biography of the chemist and amateur meteorologist, who devised the modern classification of clouds (cumulus, nimbus, etc.), Luke Howard (1772-1864), it is noted that Constable, who was familiar with Howard’s work, focussed his concentration:

‘… on the extension of his observational range and clouds were the means that he had chosen for the task. After years of searching for an isolated image, seeking a motif upon which to weigh his technical advancement as a painter, he had found it at last in the unending sequences of clouds that emerged and dissolved before his eyes like images on a photographic plate.’

During the summers of 1821 and 1822, Constable made over one hundred cloud studies on the higher ground of Hampstead and its heath.  Writing in 1964 in his ‘The Philosophy of Modern Art’, the art critic Herbert Read (1893-1968), who lived in Hampstead, commented that Constable was:

‘… rather a modest craftsman, interested in the efficiency of his tools, the chemistry of his materials, the technique of his craft. His preparatory ‘sketches’ are no more romantic than a weather report. But they are accurate, they are vividly expressed, they are truthful.’

And here the extract from my book ends. It is because of Constable’s ‘connections’ with Hampstead and the clouds above it that I chose the title “Beneath a Wide Sky …” I had seen a few of Constable’s cloud studies before, but never so many together as I viewed at the Tate Britain exhibition. My book is available both as a paperback and a Kindle from Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B09R2WRK92

An artist struck by illness but not defeated

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AT TWO TEMPLE PLACE, which is close to Temple Underground station, there is an exhibition, “The Weight of Being”, showing until 19 April 2026. The theme of the exhibition is “vulnerability, resilience, and mental health in art”. The show contains a good number of paintings and other creations by the artist John Wilson McCracken (1936-1982), an artist who is new to me. The reason for his inclusion in the show will become obvious soon.

From an early age, McCracken, who was born in Belfast and educated in Birmingham, displayed artistic talent. In 1956, he applied to enter London’s prestigious Slade School of Fine Art, and was accepted as a student. One of his teachers there was the artist Lucien Freud, who was a visiting tutor at the school. Soon, McCracken became a regular at the Colony Room, a drinking hole in Soho. It was here that leading artists including Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, and others met to drink, discuss, and argue. McCracken found himself in one of the epicentres of the world of then modern British art, and valued his encounters in this inspiring artistic milieu.

Near the end of his second year at the Slade, disaster struck. McCracken had a severe nervous breakdown. He was hospitalised, and diagnosed with schizophrenia. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, being diagnosed with ‘mental disease’ was a great social stigma, and an impediment for a young artist hoping for success in the London art world. His mother decided that the family should move away from London to the northeast, far away from London’s temptations and the intense atmosphere of the city’s art scene. They moved to Hartlepool, where the family had relatives.

McCracken continued his art education at West Hartlepool College of Art, where later he became a teacher. In addition, he worked in the town’s public Gray Art Gallery. While there, he not only arranged for a Lucien Freud exhibition to be brought from London to the gallery, but also got the gallery to acquire a wide range of then modern artworks by artists including LS Lowry, Frank Auerbach, John Bratby, and others. At that time, the works of these now very famous artists were affordable, and by purchasing them, McCracken ensured that the gallery acquired an important collection of modern British art. In addition, he formed a collective of artists called Front Group, whose members believed that contemporary art should not be confined to galleries in London.

While all this was going on in Hartlepool, McCracken never stopped painting. Most of his work depicts people. But like Francis Bacon, whom he knew, his subjects often are in awkward poses. Whereas Bacon distorted his subjects in a modern expressionist way, McCracken depicts them more realistically. As Angela Thomas, the curator of the exhibition, wrote in the catalogue:

“Like Freud he captured the humanity of his subjects: their gestures, postures, and unspoken stories, rendered with empathy and attentiveness.”

I am not greatly enthusiastic about Lucien Freud’s art, but what I have seen of McCracken I much prefer. Freud does not seem to like the people he portrays; he highlights their less attractive features. In contrast, McCracken appears to see what is likeable about his subjects, and gives them an empathetic rendering.

A wonderful pub near to London’s Smithfield Market

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HERE IS A LONDON hostelry worth visiting.

The Hand and Shears pub near London’s Smithfield Market is a delightful, old-fashioned drinking hole. It was granted a licence in 1552, but may have been in existence before that date. The building housing the pub was constructed in about 1852, and its interior has hardly changed since then. Apart from selling booze, the pub used to be a place where meetings were held, as well as coroner’s inquests.

The pub’s name derives from the that the building in which it is located was used by cloth merchants to settle arguments and other matters relating to their business.

Its centrally positioned bar serves customers in each of four rooms surrounding it. The rooms are separated from each other by partitions, but all of them face the bar which they surround. We visited the pub on a weekday at lunchtime. Many local business people were enjoying a sociable pint or two while chatting amongst themselves.

The Hand and Shears is what I believe a pub should be.

The artist Turner and his depictions of India

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ALTHOUGH THE ROYAL Academician John Zoffany (1733-1810) visited India and created paintings there, the younger and more famous Academician JMW Turner (1775-1851) never visited the country. Yet, an exhibition at the Tate Britain in London, which is showing until 12 April 2026, contains two of Turner’s depictions of Indian landscapes.

Both Zoffany and Turner lived and worked before the birth and full exploitation of photography. Travellers could record their impressions of places both by writing and by sketching or painting. Amongst the many who went out to India in the nineteenth and earlier centuries, there were plenty of officials (both military and civilian) who recorded what they saw by sketching and with paints. It would seem that these people were skilled artists probably because art was included in their education. The images created were important for surveying and topographical purposes as well as, perhaps, a way of passing time in outposts where there was little else to do when the work of the day was over.

Turner, who had become a successful artist, was often commissioned by print publishers to create images that could later be reproduced as mass produced editions of engravings. He painted images of places he had visited as well as places he had never been to. India was one of the latter. However, he created beautiful watercolour depictions of Indian landscapes based on sketches that had been made by British army officers when they were based in India. The two ‘Indian’ watercolours on display in the exhibition are “Musooree and the Dhoon from Landor” (painted in 1835) and “Rocks at Colgong on the Ganges in Bihar” (painted c1835). Both are exquisitely executed and less ethereal than some of his better-known paintings.

Although Turner never travelled outside Europe, it is highly likely that the influence of British India made itself felt in his later works. In an interview recorded in the scroll.in website (https://scroll.in/magazine/827492/how-the-british-raj-in-india-brightened-the-palette-of-jmw-turner), Tate Britain curator David Blayney Brown is quoted as saying:

“Turner was a great and inventive colourist. If you look at his work from the beginning to the end of his life, the early works are quite dark and sombre, but the later ones are full of colour – brilliant yellow, red, blacks, crimsons, blues. Even if he hadn’t been to somewhere like India, he lived in a place where a lot of people had and they were bringing back descriptions of a more colourful place than England, which was smoky and dark and dull and raining all the time. People were coming back to this England with memories of a place that was full of colour. This was bound to change people’s ideas. In Sir John Soane’s museum in London, there is a bright yellow living room, almost an Indian yellow. That was a yellow that was introduced in Turner’s lifetime, much brighter than anything available before. The tastes for those colours would definitely have been brought back from the empire.”

Even if we cannot be certain, it is possible that some of the pigments brought back from India might have found their way on to his glorious canveses.

The two Indian landscapes form only a minute part of a large, well-attended show setting the works of Constable and Turner side-by-side. Yet, seeing them really helped make the exhibition a ‘hit’ for me. Soon, I will write about other aspects of this show that caught my interest.

Once the Commonwealth Institute, now the Design Museum

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Here is a short extract from my book “BEYOND MARYLEBONE AND MAYFAIR: EXPLORING WEST LONDON”. The extract concerns an unusual building next to Holland Park:

“Set back from the main road, and partly hidden by two hideous cuboid buildings, stands an unusual glass-clad building with an amazing, distorted tent-shaped roof (made of copper). This used to be the Commonwealth Institute. Built in 1962 (architects: Robert Matthew Johnson-Marshall & Partners), I remember, as a schoolboy, visiting the rather gloomy collection of exhibits that it contained shortly after it opened. The Institute closed in late 2002, and the fascinating building stood empty until 2012, when it was restored and re-modelled internally. In 2016, it became the home of the Design Museum. Like the architecturally spectacular Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan, the building competes with the exhibits for the viewer’s attention, and then wins over them easily. The displays in the Design Museum are a poor advert for the skills of British designers, whereas the building’s restored interior is a triumph. This is a place to enjoy the building rather than the exhibits. One notable exception to this comment is the sculpture by Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005), which stands outside the front of the museum.


The museum borders Holland Park, which is well-worth exploring. By the park’s High Street entrance, there is a plaque giving the history of the ‘Trafalgar Way’. This was the route taken between Falmouth and London by Lieutenant John Richards Lapenotière (1770-1834), when he carried news of Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar in 1805. It is at this point that I will let you rest on a bench in the park, or to enjoy the delights of its lovely Kyoto and Fukushima Japanese Gardens.“‘

My book is available from Amazon sites by clicking below:

Fading lettering and an Edwardian building on London’s Harrow Road

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A LARGE BRICK edifice with white stone trimmings stands on the corner of Woodfield Road and the larger Harrow Road. Built in 1902, it now houses Westminster Register Office, but this has not always been the case. A clue to its former purpose can be seen on a brick pillar on one side of a now disused entrance to the building on Woodfield Road. In fading painted lettering, one can see the words “Guardians Offices”.

A somewhat difficult to read metal plaque on the staircase leading up to the building’s main entrance on Harrow Road gives a history of this elegant house. It was opened in 1902 as the then new offices of the Paddington Guardians, who supervised the running of the local workhouse. The Paddington Workhouse was built on a bank of the Grand Union Canal in 1846, and extended in 1868. According to an informative website (www.workhouses.org.uk/Paddington/):

“One of the labour tasks for able-bodied inmates at Paddington was stone breaking.”

In 1914, all the inmates of the workhouse were taken to the Marylebone Workhouse, and the Paddington establishment was turned into a military hospital that specialised in the care of men without limbs. In 1930, the place became Paddington General Hospital, and after 1986 it was demolished.

Returning to the building on Harrow Road, its new purpose came into being in 1965 after the original town hall on Paddington Green had been demolished to make place for the then new Westway. The council offices were moved into the former Guardians’ office building. In 1999, the building was demolished leaving intact only the grand façade we can see today. The 1902 façade is attached to newer buildings that contain the Register Offices in addition to residential flats managed by Paddington Churches Housing Association.

Despite its many reincarnations, the gatepost with its fading painted lettering is a reminder of the building’s original role.

Made by hand in Japan and on display in London

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THIS IS AN exhibition you should not miss if you are in London anytime before 10 May 2026. It is being held at Japan House London in High Street Kensington, and is called “Hyakkō”. This Japanese word means ‘one hundred makers’. The exhibition is a display of 2000 handmade works made by 123 craftsmen and craftswomen in Japan. The exhibits are all exquisitely made. They are made using one or more of the following materials: ceramics, wood, metals, leather, and glass,

The works are attractively displayed, labelled, and well-lit. Accompanying the exhibits, there is a series of beautifully filmed videos. Each of these shows the makers at work in their studios and workshops in Japan. The videos show how natural materials are gathered, processed, and then transformed into fine examples of applied art.  Many of the items seen being made in the films can be found in the exhibition. Watching the videos is an important part of enjoying the exhibition because you begin to appreciate the skill and artistry employed to create what you can see close-up in the show. I would advise you to watch the screenings first, and then to view the products of the skilful creators who appear in the films.

Not only are the creations wonderful in themselves, but the way that they have been exhibited is a work of art. Whoever designed the exhibition seems to share the superb aesthetic sensibilities of those who created the exhibits. It is worth visiting Kensington to enjoy this visual treat from Japan.

A gripping novel written in the nineteenth century

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HERE IS A book I have greatly enjoyed reading. It is “The Bertrams” by Anthony Trollope (1815-1882). First published in 1859, this is a story that highlights some weaknesses of human behaviour, the consequences of ill-conceived decision making, and the risks taken when marrying for the wrong reason. The novel is set mainly in England, but significant parts of it take place in the Middle East, notably in Egypt and the Holy Land.

 

The main characters in the story are George Bertram, George’s miserly but extremely wealthy uncle, George’s cousin Arthur who attended Oxford with him, Henry Harcourt who is a little older than George, Caroline Waddington, and Adela Gauntlet. George falls in love with Caroline, and Arthur with Adela. Each man wins the heart of the lady with whom they have fallen in love. However, in both cases, there are impediments that prevent them from marrying. Eventually to George’s great dismay, Caroline marries his friend Harcourt, by now a successful lawyer and ambitious politician. But this is a marriage without love, for Harcourt has married Caroline in the hope that she will receive a huge inheritance from her grandfather, who is George Bertram’s uncle.

 

In addition to the principal characters, there are many minor characters, most of whom are important in the story. Trollope’s portrayal of these and the main protagonists is both perceptive and often rich in humour. Throughout the novel, he explores the strength and frailties of human behaviour. He also describes how nineteenth century English people behave while travelling abroad. Although my copy of the book has almost 580 pages, not including notes on the text and a long introductory essay by Geoffrey Harvey, the story never flagged. Even though I began to guess how the tale would end, it was fascinating to follow its often-surprising twists and turns on its way to the conclusion.

 

“The Bertrams” is not only a ‘page turner’, but an example of storytelling at its best.