John Constable: Toward a Complete Chronology. - Reed College

During the years that this chronology has been under development, a number of
Reed students have worked with me on the project, funded partly by summer
grants from Reed College. I thank especially for their careful work and
companionship Sarah Barnaby and Nonna Crook, for taking notes; Carl McConnell
and Keith Pachard, for writing the computer program; Mark Worthington and
Nancy Hall, for entering data; and, more recently, Reed graduate Nadine Fiedler,
for her expert editing of the final document.
Computer use in compiling the Constable Chronology was described in the
1984 volume of abstracts 4 published in conjunction with the Second
International Conference on Automatic Processing of Art History Data and
Documents. As described in that volume, "the key to an accurate, efficient
system for entry and retrieval was writing a program that would accommodate
every form in which dates appear in the documents so that when keyed in each
reference would appear automatically in its prescribed chronological location."
For permission to quote from the published volumes of Constable's
correspondence, discourses, and other documents, my thanks to Norman Scarfe
and the Suffolk Records Society. For permission to quote from the published
volumes of Farington's diary, my thanks to Michael Kitson and The Paul Mellon
Centre for Studies in British Art, London.
Charles S. Rhyne
Portland, Oregon
4 Charles S. Rhyne, "John Constable (1776-1837): A Complete Chronology," in
Census: Computerization in the History of Art, ed. Laura Corti, Vol. 1 (Pisa:
Scuola Normale Superiore, and The J. Paul Getty Trust, Los Angeles, 1984),
pp. 31/1-31/2