(piano music playing) Steven: We're in the Huntington Library and we're looking at
one of John Constable's six paintings that are
called the six-footers. These are large-scale landscapes and ... Beth: Which was a radical idea. Steven: Landscape was
not considered high genre of art, at all. Landscape
was close to the bottom and this was a scale
that was appropriate for history painting. Beth: So Constable is
immediately making a statement. about the importance of landscape painting and interestingly, not
painting in Italian-age classical, timeless
landscape, but very much his own landscape of his native Suffolk. Steven: This is where
his father's farm was and so this was an environment that he was extremely familiar with. Beth: And it's not at all
ideal, feels like a specific time of day, a specific season,
a specific kind of weather. Steven: And in fact, Constable,
we think is the first artist who will take weather seriously and to study meteorological books and the trees are so specific, the foliage is so specific,
you could actually determine what kind of foliage this is. Beth: It looks like either
a storm is approaching or has just passed. You can
almost feel the coolness of the breeze. There's
something very rough and tactile and it's a beautiful,
ideal, pastoral English landscape, but at the same
time, it's filled with qualities, of the mud of the river and the plants growing by the
bank, but you can feel it. Steven: And this is a painting
that is about landscape, but it's also filled with vignettes. You have men pulling and pushing. You can see two barges in the canal and somebody who seems
to be pushing them apart to maneuver one of these
barges past the other, the white horse on the left is at rest and the men are doing the labor here. Beth: That's true and then
across the footbridge, we see a woman carrying a
baby bathed in sunlight. Another figure doing
some washing in the river and another couple of figures
just beginning to move on to that footbridge
and then in the distance, a sail on a boat and then
a sail on another barge and then in the further
distance, have a church and it's clearly an important
part of this painting, the English Anglican church
and so there's a real sense of timelessness that this
is a kind of cycle of life. ordained by God and will continue forever. Steven: I agree. It is
timeless, but it's also full of particularities, the
clouds, the types of trees, Beth: the weather. we see a rake, some water
lilies in the lower left, the particulars of the
reflection in the canal itself. Beth: But it's a kind of an
idea of a particularity that Steven: That's right. Steven: What's actually
happening to British society at this moment. This is
the industrial revolution and with trains, these kinds
of barges are no longer going to be that useful to
transport grain into the cities to the markets. Beth: The price of food
had fallen and there was real unrest in the countryside
itself, fires, major political unrests that had
the aristocracy and the landowners like Contable's
own father, really fearful for the future of England. Steven: So is this a kind of
a denial then or a kind of nostalgic review to a
fleeting present and perhaps, a really even a past. Beth; Well then Constable's
own past, his own sense of his boyhood, his own nostalgia. I think there's a both
a personal nostalgia for the place that he grew
up, a feeling that many of us know very well, but
also nostalgia perhaps for that a sense of an England
that was disappearing. (piano music playing)