Centre-ville, John Constable exhibition

John Constable's exhibition in Grasmere; John Constable (11 June 1776 - 31 March 1837) was an English Romantic painter. The Wordsworth Trust's exhibition for summer 2006 was a bicentenary celebration of John Constable's tour of the Lake District in September and October 1806. The centrepiece of the exhibition was a representative selection of the almost 100 surviving drawings that Constable made. Constable came to the Lake District as a rather depressed young man who had yet to establish himself as an artist of promise, and the exhibition argues that the landscape, so different from his native East Anglia, had a liberating effect upon him, and that he left the area a more confident artist. Despite the dreadful weather, the Lake District provided Constable with the excitement of varied mountain scenery, and he drew what he saw both passionately and inquisitively. The relative freedom from man in the Lake District allowed Constable to paint other things - rough plants, weather, waterfalls. Hills were walked up as well as seen from a distance, and shown with a new sense of their structure, their organic architecture.