Discover Constable and The Hay Wain. National Gallery’s homage to the man and his masterpiece
By James Brewer
John Constable, one of England’s greatest artists, never ventured overseas. He had no need to: he had subject matter aplenty at hand in his beloved Suffolk, and access to a booming London art market.
Even when Charles X of France awarded him a gold medal for a painting shown in the Paris Salon, someone collected the award on his behalf. That remarkable piece was The Hay Wain.
London’s National Gallery has opened the exhibition Discover Constable and The Hay Wain focusing on Constable’s much-loved masterpiece which has become a quintessential symbol of the countryside of Britain and of its landscape.
What should be remembered is that Constable’s compositions signified more than rural charm – they underlined the trade and transport on his beloved, winding, River Stour. As the son of wealthy mill owner and corn merchant, Golding Constable, he was close to the activity on the river. A lucrative carrying trade along the Stour had been flourishing for more than 100 years. Lighters of wood and clinker for the waterway were built in the nearby Flatford basin.
In its bicentenary year, the National Gallery’s focus on The Hay Wain underlines 1824 as an international moment for Constable, the year the painting was acclaimed in the French capital, having had a disappointing London reception three years earlier at the Royal Academy’s summer exhibition.
The first loan exhibition at the National Gallery on Constable (1776–1837) excels in drawing out the social, political and artistic context at the time of The Hay Wain’s debut.
The countryside was changing physically and politically. Legal changes had removed common access to many areas. Restrictions on imports of grain were introduced after the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815. These Corn Laws (repealed only in 1846) meant tariffs of up to 80% on imported grain and resulted in dearer food and hunger among the poor, as agitation for reform was supressed, while domestic landowners were enriched.
An article entitled Navigation in the River Stour, on the website of The Foxearth and District Local History Society, concludes that the river trade must have flourished during the 18th century, for in 1817 there were 36 barges on the river, including three belonging to Messrs Constable of Dedham, and six owned by Mr Elliston Allen of Sudbury. Apparently four years later (when The Hay Wain was created), there was an increase in traffic, with 41 barges working.
For the trade, horsepower was crucial: a single horse could pull between 30 and 50 tons by river. Trade downriver was in beans, wheat, barley, malt, and woollen goods, which were transferred to larger vessels, usually sea-going, wind-powered Thames barges to complete the journey to London. Competition from rail and road transport brought the river trade to an end in 1930, “after 225 years of faithful service to the area,” wrote Andrew Clarke, author of the local history article.
In Constable’s time, landscape painting could offer a reassuringly timeless vision of Britain, say the National Gallery curators Christine Riding, director of collections and research, and Mary McMahon, associate curator of NG200 Collections. The genre was still considered ‘inferior’ compared to history painting, although this was changing under the influence of great artists of the European tradition. Painters engaged with traditions established by Dutch, Flemish and French artists, and some set out to establish a distinct British school of art through close observation of the natural world. Constable was sympathetic to these approaches, while scorning such practitioners as the English painter John Wootton (c 1682-1764). Wootton, one of whose works interestingly was Haycart Passing a Ruined Abbey, was among those who “painted country gentlemen in their wigs and jockey caps, and top boots, with packs of hounds, and placed them in Italian landscapes resembling those of Gaspar Poussin [one of the leading landscape painters of 17th-century Rome] except in power and force,” thundered Constable.
The National Gallery exhibition points to some stilted formality in depicting peasant life by George Stubbs (1724-1806), who is chiefly renowned for the success of his equine subjects.
The Hay Wain was once considered radical as a reimagining of the landscape tradition: Constable depicts labourers, whom he clearly respected, working together in the fields or on the Stour. He paints in The Hay Wain three horses pulling a large farm wagon across the river, although no-one today knows why the wagon is in the river. The setting is near Flatford Mill which belonged to Constable’s father, and on the far left is the house of a tenant farmer, Willy Lott.
Initially self-taught, Constable was from 1800 a student at the Royal Academy schools. Although he had rooms in London, the centre of the Georgian art world, he returned to the family home for long periods until his marriage in 1816. One of the aims of the National Gallery exhibition is to show how Constable came to have a central role in British art as his work entered the collections of major galleries and museums – it was acquired by the National Gallery in 1886. Unlike his contemporary JMW Turner who visited France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Luxembourg, Denmark, Bohemia, Switzerland and Italy, the Suffolk man remained in England.
Constable painted The Hay Wain — originally titled Landscape: Noon – over five months in his London studio in preparation for a Royal Academy annual exhibition. He worked from preliminary sketches, probably made en plein air, an approach he favoured in his quest to represent ‘truth to nature’. Glorying in cornfields and hay meadows in high summer, his use of green (as opposed to traditional brown) was innovative, as was the precise – almost scientific – depiction of cloud formations in his big skies. His forensic interest in meteorology is highlighted in the exhibition by his sketches and copies of cloud studies by the experimental watercolourist Alexander Cozens.
Curator Christine Riding emphasises that scale is used to catch the eye The sheer size of the painting in focus – six feet in width – is reminiscent of Rubens, Ruisdael and Claude (whom he also admired for colour and composition, and symbolised agricultural prosperity. His so-called ‘six footers’ depicted other landscapes beyond ‘Constable country’– London, Salisbury and Brighton.
The realistic treatment of English locations in an Old Master way made The Hay Wain strikingly highly original, and there is a debt to the Dutch such as Meindert Hobbema (1638-1709), known for woodland scenes, watermills, and his dramatic painting The Avenue at Middelharnis. Hobbema’s work was popular in England, and in practical terms his compatriots changed the face of eastern England: the marshy Norfolk Broads were drained by the Dutch-born engineer Sir Cornelius Vermuyden,
In the exhibition, the spiritual landscape is indicated by the works of William Blake (1757–1827) with a plate of pastoral idyll, The Shepherd, from Songs of Innocence and of Experience (a collection that elsewhere raged against oppression and poverty of the masses and included the lines Tyger Tyger, burning bright, /In the forests of the night; /What immortal hand or eye, /Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
Some satirical prints of the day including a skit by Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827) made light of the hard lot of farm labourers. Rowlandson’s hand-coloured etching Rural Sports. Or a pleasant way of making hay (1814) holds up agricultural labour as an opportunity for sex rather than hard physical work. The suggestion is that men and women working together in the field could not resist carnal contact. Are the workers the butt of the joke or is it that fantasies about ‘loose morals’ in the countryside are being mocked?
Seeing Constable alongside other artists who drew inspiration from East Anglia adds heavyweight context. Turner painted The Vale of Ashburnham in 1816; John Crome Marlingford Grove in about 1815; and Thomas Gainsborough Cornard Wood in 1748.
Two deeply personal works (Golding Constable’s Flower Garden, and Golding Constable’s Kitchen Garden, from 1815 were made after the death of his mother Ann, alluding to her interest in horticulture while representing a landscape her son cherished.
The last section of the exhibition has another compelling instalment works from shortly after The Hay Wain, which bolstered the artist’s reputation. These are Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s Ground (1823) which went to the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A) and which incorporates the artist’s beloved subjects: the clouds, trees, a water meadow, cattle drinking at the edge of the pasture and the glorious architecture of the medieval cathedral; and The Cornfield, 1826, the first of his works to enter the National Gallery.
Images:
The Hay Wain, 1821 By John Constable (1776–1837). Oil on canvas. © The National Gallery, London.
The Hay Wain. Detail.
Sketch for The Hay Wain, about 1820. By John Constable. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut Paul Mellon Collection.
Gallery setting of The Hay Wain. At right, a work by George Stubbs.
Constable’s sketchbook. July 1814 – October 1815. © V&A Images/ Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Admiring John Constable’s scrupulous observation of the natural world’
Rich examples of 19th century art in the exhibition.
The Shepherd, plate 4 in Songs of Innocence and of Experience (copy F), 1789. By William Blake. Relief etching printed in green with pen and black ink and watercolour. © Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut, Paul Mellon Collection.
Rural Sports. Or a pleasant way of making hay, 1814. By Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827). Etching with contemporary hand colouring on wove paper. Nicholas JS Knowles.
Discover Constable and The Hay Wain is in the Sunley Room of the National Gallery, London, until February 2 Sunley Room Admission free
