Ruth Leon recommends: Constable’s The Hay Wain – National Gallery
Ruth Leon recommendsConstable’s The Hay Wain – National Gallery
Click here to watch
This new film is part of the National Gallery’s new exclusive ‘National Treasures’ film series. A key strand of the National Gallery’s Bicentenary celebrations, this is one of 12 loaned paintings from the Gallery’s collection across partner venues throughout the UK, providing expert commentary on these iconic masterpieces.
The Hay Wain (1821) by John Constable will be familiar to many as capturing quintessential English life in the Suffolk countryside. But does this familiarity stop us from seeing how radical this landscape picture was at the time? Curator Mary McMahon shows us the artistic innovations he made.
The traditional, academic hierarchy of artistic genres still held weight in Constable’s time, which did not favour landscape painters. However, Thomas Gainsborough had paved the way in the previous generation of painters to pursue landscapes.
Constable painted Flatford Mill, which his family had leased for nearly a century, from his London studio, working from sketches and studies. The building survives and is today known as Willy Lott’s Cottage.
His brushwork was loose and broad for the time, and he drew directly from nature for his bright colour palette. This distinguished him from the works of Old Masters.
Yes, Constable’s canvas is a masterpiece.
But the loose brushwork had already been exploited in earlier ages: late Titian, late Rembrandt, Hals.
Indeed he was enthralled by late Titian. Further, this painting is a studio painting that used drawings and oil sketches done in nature. All his large paintings are studio paintings.