William George Constable (1887-1976) was an art historian and museum curator. He worked at the National Gallery, London (1923-1931) becoming Assistant Director (1930-1931); he was the first Director of the Courtauld Institute (1931-1937) and Curator at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (1938-1957). He published widely on art collecting, connoisseurship, and British and Italian art.
There are art historians who are efficient but boring. One imagines that if they were writing a history of sanitation in seventeenth-century Italy, they would be equally workmanlike and equally boring. I always like art historians who have had a life outside of art history; who are capable of putting art into a wider perspective; who have a solid baseline of common sense; and who want to communicate to a wider public.
One such individual is W.G. Constable (1887-1976) who studied law at Cambridge, practiced at the Bar, then was a soldier in World War One. In 1917 he was buried alive in a bomb blast (briefly) and, in a long recuperation, decided that he wanted to study art.
He first enrolled in the Slade but, realizing that he would never make it as a painter, he turned first to lecturing, and then, in 1923, joined the National Gallery in London, rising to assistant director within eight years. In 1930 he was approached to become the first head of the Courtauld Institute and accepted. At that time no British university was teaching art history, so Constable rounded up every major connoisseur and historian to give lectures. He also succeeded Roger Fry as Slade Professor of Fine Art in 1935 but, after disagreements with the establishment, left for America in 1937, becoming head of Fine Art at Boston University. That was Britain’s loss.
(l-r) portrait of WG Constable; sketches from his notebooks, held in Paul Mellon Centre archive collection
Although he is best known for his two-volume catalogue raisonné on the 18th century Italian painter Canaletto, published in 1962 and regularly updated (which was the foundation for all future studies), I want to refer you now to his 1954 The Painter’s Workshop, a marvellous book, one of the first of its kind in English in this field which I have in a copy that once belonged to the Irish art critic Kenneth Jamison who was an early director of The Arts Council of Northern Ireland.
The book, which ranges from the Middle Ages to the early twentieth century, takes you into the artist’s studio, explains his workshop organisation and his equipment, then explores the physical structure of a painting: its support, its ground, its priming, its paint layer, and its protective coating. This is followed by four chapters on painting processes: wax, pastel and watercolour; fresco; tempera; and oil painting.
The book is rounded off by a chapter on preliminaries to an oil painting (preliminary sketches and the like), a chapter on the restorer’s contribution and a list for further reading.
(l-r) Various editions of The Painter's Workshop
There are twenty-five black-and-white plates and, unlike so many artists’ manuals, technical detail is kept to a minimum, there is no art jargon, and the whole is written in simple straight forward English. This is not a person who wants to show off his learning: it is a person who wants to communicate to you and who wants to help you understand how paintings were made, whether in the Middle Ages or in the Impressionist era.
Brian McAvera, May 2025
We have copies of Constable’s books in the NI Visual Art Research Library & Archive at the Golden Thread Gallery. NIVARLA will launch formally in the Spring, and items in the rare and special collection will be available to view by appointment. We will share more information on how to access and use NIVARLA soon!
The Northern Ireland Visual Art Research Library & Archive is supported by the Ampersand Foundation, with many books and archive items donated and on loan from the McAvera & Walker Library.
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