National Gallery of Australia | Audio Tour | Turner to Monet: the triumph of landscape

Constable, one of the foremost British landscape painters of the nineteenth century, first achieved success with his large canvases depicting landscape and life in and around the Stour Valley, which he exhibited between 1819 and 1825. Such was the success of the first of these large paintings, The white horse 1819,1 when Constable exhibited it at the Royal Academy in 1819, that he was elected Associate of the Academy later that year.2 Working on a scale usually reserved for history painting, Constable redefined the notion of a ‘finished’ picture by giving his large landscapes something of the spontaneous freedom and expressive handling of a rapidly painted sketch. The leaping horse is the sixth and the last of these large Stour Valley landscapes and one of the most powerful. Constable chose a place called Float Jump, close to where the course of the old river temporarily left the navigable portion of the Stour. It also marked the boundary between the counties of Essex and Suffolk. The jump itself consisted o