Constable was not proud of his work as a portraitist and only ever exhibited one example, a portrait of his

friend John Fisher. Nor was it only his own portraits that he disparaged; he complained in 1803 that there were too many portraits in the Royal Academy exhibition. Nevertheless, he applied himself to the genre and became an accomplished portraitist. In 1804 he produced his most compositionally complex portrait, The Bridges Family, which depicts the local banker George Bridges, a business associate of Constables father, with his wife and their eight children. The main problem that a group like this presented for the painter was how to treat each sitter individually and at the same time give a sense of the family as a social unit, a small community. The figures could not be too formally arranged without losing the sense of the life of the family; on the other hand, some kind of hierarchical ranking was necessary so that the roles of the various members could be understood and the idea of a well-ordered family promoted. Constable produced a restrained and elegant solution to these problems through formal simplification. By slightly flattening and pushing the group back from the picture plane Constable has enabled depth relationships (before, behind) to be read laterally (to the left of, to the right of ). Gender within the family is signified unambiguously: the mother and the girls all wear white, the father and the boys wear black. The furniture and the background are predominantly brown and are depicted as a set of rectangular surfaces parallel to the picture plane. The most striking of these is the side of the piano or harpsichord. The distinctive curve of the instrument may be inferred from the position of the mother and from the baby sitting on the corner, but it is not actually shown; it continues, again as a fl at plane, beneath the window. The inlaid border connects it with the panel of the shutter above the mothers head and with the side of the bench in the bottom left corner. This arrangement allots a space to the father and the eldest son that is almost abstract and quite distinct from that of the mother, who is more fully linked to both the children and the home. The fathers portrait has the greatest amount of space around it (on either side), which underscores his importance, but he is curiously disengaged from the scene. He looks out into space past the viewers right shoulder, neither engaging the viewer nor attending to anyone in the family. Within this spare, almost austere arrangement there are two objects that escape the planar grid. They are the chair at the front, on which the girl holding a book sits, and the sheet music on the keyboard. These set up two diagonal lines that tie the two halves of the picture together and significantly lead to the father and the mother; the sheet music also negotiates the transition from the deep shadow to the right of the father to the brightness of the babys dress. The eldest girl reads the music and plays to her family, while the younger girl shows the book to her little sister. The qualities being stressed here are accomplishment, education and communication. The activities of reading and music were important social markers and portray the children as well brought up. In a more general way, it is through reading that the family members are shown to communicate with one another. This is the life of the painting, and the black and white of the texts that we cannot see continue to resonate in the black and white costumes of the group. In this way the painting makes the idea of the family legible and associates the idea of social order with legibility itself.

Tratto dalla monografia su John Constable edita da Phaidon Press. Per vedere il quadro descritto: http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork? cgroupid=999999961&workid=2622&searchid=9781&tabview=image