Tim Adams talks to painter Frank Auerbach about the work of John Constable on the occasion of the exhibition Constable: The Making of a Master at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, on view through January 15, 2015.

Auerbach tells Adams: "With the passage of time … Constable has meant more and more and more to me. It is not so much about the more well-known qualities – the clouds and the freshness and the light. It is more that I can’t think of another painter who has invested quite so much in every single image. If I look at Crossing the Brook or Salisbury Cathedral, I am struck by that sense of how Constable has gone round and round and round the subject. He seems to have walked every path, measured every distance between every tree. Everything has been worked for and made personal so you sometimes feel that Constable’s own body is somehow inside the landscapes there."