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Europe 1800 - 1900
Course: Europe 1800 - 1900 > Unit 2
Lesson 5: England (Constable, Turner, Martin and Nash)- Constable and the English Landscape
- Constable, Wivenhoe Park
- Constable, The Hay Wain (Landscape: Noon)
- Constable, View on the Stour near Dedham
- Constable, View on the Stour near Dedham
- Constable, Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows
- Who is JMW Turner?
- Turner, The Harbour of Dieppe
- Turner, The Fighting Temeraire
- Turner, Slave Ship
- Turner's Slave Ship
- J.M.W. Turner, Snow Storm
- Turner, Rain, steam, and speed – the great western railway
- Turner's gallery: on the left
- Turner's gallery: opposite the door
- Turner's gallery: the back wall
- Turner's gallery: on the right
- Room: JMW Turner
- Martin, The Great Day of His Wrath
- John Nash, Royal Pavilion, Brighton
- Romanticism in England
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Constable, The Hay Wain (Landscape: Noon)
John Constable, The Hay Wain (Landscape: Noon), 1821, oil on canvas, 130.2 x 185.4 cm (The National Gallery, London). Speakers: Dr. Steven Zucker and Dr. Beth Harris.
Want to join the conversation?
- Was the "distillation" a normal method of composing the picture, or was Constable unique in this process?(2 votes)
Video transcript
(soft piano music) - [Steven] We're in the
National Gallery in London looking at one of John
Constable's six-footers. - [Beth] The six-footers
are a series of paintings that are six feet wide and
this was an unusual size for landscape paintings
in the early 19th century. The date of his painting is 1821. - [Steven] The original
title was Landscape Noon, but it's now known
universally as The Hay Wain, and I think it's hard for us to retrieve how radical it was to put forward as your subject at this scale, nature. - [Beth] Landscape painting was one of the lowliest subjects according to the Royal Academy here in London because it was the idea
of painting something that was right in front of you. Just like painting a portrait of something right in front of you. - [Steven] So important history subjects, religious subjects, they
were often quite large, and less important subjects, landscape, still lifes they were painted on smaller canvases. - [Beth] So Constable
is being ambitious here, which might seem funny because the subject seems so very mundane. What we're looking at is
a view of the Stour River where Constable grew up and a hay wain, a cart moving through that river with a woman in the
background doing some washing, a dog barking, some farmers
working in the field in the background, the clouds
passing in the sky at noon. - [Steven] So what is
Constable heroicizing with the scale of this canvas? - [Beth] Constable's
father was a landowner and Constable came from
a well-to-do family in rural Suffolk in England. This is a moment when the land in the countryside is fraught. When they're at very
severe economic stresses and unemployment among the workers. - [Steven] In the early
Industrial Revolution, machines were perceived to
be taking employment away. There was great poverty, but
we see none of that here. - [Beth] Landscapes are
expected to be classical and beautiful to show
us something idealized, but Constable is refusing
to idealize here. - [Steven] If Constable is
looking back to any art history, he's looking back to the Dutch,
to artists like Ruisdael. Look at the amount of this canvas that's given over to the sky. Constable had studied meteorology
which was a new subject. - [Beth] And that specificity
of Dutch painting, capturing a time of day. The title of this painting is Noon. Specifics that are very much opposite of the idealizing tradition that was recommended by the Academy. - [Steven] And in that way there is a subtle political undercurrent, however, we're not close to the workers, we don't actually see their faces. - [Beth] The farmers in the background have become one with nature. There's no sense of the landscape of nature being something
that's fraught at this moment. - [Steven] The artist was
creating a new kind of beauty. Finding beauty even in the most lowly. That was an expression of
his personal experience. - [Beth] And I think that's
what makes this romantic when we talk about the style
of Romanticism in England, we're thinking about a kind of art that is personal, that is emotional. And we have this lovely quote
from Constable about this. He said, writing to a friend, the sound of water
escaping from mill dams, willows, old rotten planks,
slimy posts and brick work. I love such things. As long as I do paint I shall never cease to paint such places. They have always been my delight. Still, I should paint my own places best. Painting is with me but
another word for feeling and I associate my careless
boyhood with all that lies on the banks of the store. These scenes made me a painter and I am grateful, that
is, I'd often thought of pictures of them before
I ever touched a pencil. So you can think about this painting as Constable loving this landscape so much, being so
intimately familiar with it. - [Steven] But even as this
painting is about his personal subjective experience, his memories, it's also a painting that is fixed in a very particular historical moment because of industrialization and because of the growth of cities. Nature has taken on a meaning because it is now removed from
people's everyday experiences. At least those that would
have seen this painting in the Royal Academy in London. - [Beth] There's certainly
real nostalgia here. - [Steven] The six-footers
were well received but the criticism that
always comes through is the lack of finish, which was so different from
the prevailing traditions in the Academy at this time. - [Beth] Where everything
had to be smoothly painted, where you were not supposed to
see the hands of the artist. - [Steven] Constable was
deliberate in creating a rough surface that he felt captured the variety of textures of
nature that he was seeing. - [Beth] We can feel
the paint moving across the surface in the currents
of the water, for example. - [Steven] And the movement
of those billowing clouds, but in some ways the painting
is also very traditional, for instance in its composition. We're led in from the lower
right and we arc slowly across the foreground towards the left and then circle back to
the broadly-lit fields and then up into the clouds. - [Beth] And so it is a fiction that Constable is giving us. This may appear to be a snapshot of a view on the river but this is
actually something very carefully composed in the artist's
studio in the city of London. - From oil sketches that
the artist had done outside, it's a distillation of his memory, of his experience, and of his skill. (soft piano music)