UK-based conservator and art historian Sarah Cove, a renowned expert on the works of English painter John Constable, joins us in Melbourne for an exclusive presentation on Constable’s late works. This presentation, just for NGV Members, celebrates the upcoming 250th anniversary of the artist’s birth in 2026, and the forthcoming exhibition on the artist at Tate Britain opening in November 2025.
Through a close examination of the artist’s materials and techniques, drawn from her technical and scientific research over the past 35 years, Cove will explore how Constable’s radical late works influenced generations of French painters, including Gericault, Delacroix, Corot and the Barbizon school, Monet and Pissarro – making Constable one of the forefathers of modern painting.
Sarah Cove ACR has worked as painting conservator, technical art historian and lecturer since the mid-1980s. She founded the Constable Research Project in 1986 and is the recognised authority on John Constable’s painting materials and techniques. She is a consultant to international museums and galleries, private collectors and salerooms and in 1988 was a vising fellow at the yale centre for British art in the USA. She has published widely including essays in Tate’s Constable (1991) and Constable: The Great Landscapes (2006) exhibition catalogues. She has lectured for the Arts Society since 2003 and at major museums, galleries and conservation venues in the UK, USA, Australia, NZ, the Netherlands and Denmark. She has appeared in a number of TV programmes including Constable in Love with Andrew Graham-Dixon and BBC’s Fake or Fortune? in 2014 and 2017. Constable is the only painter to be featured twice in the show during which Sarah has been instrumental in the discovery of three new Constables.
This program is part of a series of Members Talks that uncover the stories behind works from the NGV Collection, developed especially for NGV Members. Book into two or more talks to receive a 10% discount.