From paint to print: Constable's English Landscape, and collaborative making in word and image

This project investigates one of the closest creative collaborations in art history, between two giants of 19th-century British
art: the painter John Constable and printmaker David Lucas. It focuses on the ground-breaking prints series, English
Landscape, a set of 22 views of English scenery produced between 1830 and 1833. The thesis will examine the annotated
trial proofs and relate these to the extensive correspondence between Constable and Lucas. It will question the nature and
mechanisms of Constable and Lucas's partnership and reveal how they managed to work collaboratively to translate a
complex series of paintings and drawings into print for a wide audience. It will also consider Constable's writing and English
Landscape as a literary work. It will ask what this series, the last major creative project of Constable's career, and ultimately
a commercial failure, can teach us about the painter's artistic vision, final decade of work and posthumous legacy. Finally, it
questions the wider significance of the series to the visual and literary cultures of 'Englishness', to landscape art, and to
nineteenth-century cultural history.