William George Constable (27 October 1887 – 3 February 1976) was an art historian and gallery director. He was the father of Medieval Historian Giles Constable.
Education
W. G. Constable was born in Derby. Distantly related to the landscape painter John Constable, he was educated at Derby School, where his father was headmaster, and at St John's College, Cambridge, where he read history, law and economics. In 1909, he was awarded the Whewell Scholarship for International Law. After gaining a First in economics in 1910, he was awarded the McMahon Law Studentship by St John's for four years, then entered the Inner Temple and was called to the Bar in May, 1914.
War Service
During the First World War, Constable served in the Sherwood Foresters for two years, but he suffered severe shell shock when a shell exploded in a trench a few feet from him, burying him alive. He then spent a long period in a nursing home while recovering.
Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge
While convalescing, Constable reworked and resubmitted an existing thesis to St John's and was elected a Fellow of the College, a position he held from January 1919 to the end of 1921.
The papers of Constable are held in multiple repositories. The Smithsonian Archives of American Art holds biographical material as well as personal and professional correspondence and research papers belonging to Constable.[1] Its collection also includes an oral history of Constable conducted in July 1972 - June 1973 by Robert Brown.[2] Some material kept and created by Constable is also held at St John's College library.[3] The Paul Mellon Centre archive holds the research notes, correspondence and photographs of Constable mainly relating to his work on the artist Richard Wilson, as well as other seventeenth-and-eighteenth-century artists.[4]
Marriage
Constable married Olivia Roberts in 1926.
Selected publications
John Flaxman 1755-1826 (University of London Press, 1927)
Art History and Connoisseurship (1938)
The Painter's Workshop (Oxford University Press, 1954)
Richard Wilson (Routledge & Paul, London, 1953)
Art Collecting in the United States of America: an Outline of a History (Nelson, London, 1964)
Canaletto: Giovanni Antonio Canal, 1697-1768 (2 vols., Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1962)