John Constable's ‘The Hay Wain': A Landmark Landscape

Wall Street Journal

2 days ago

The National Gallery, London, founded in 1824, celebrated its bicentenary in small exhibitions across the U.K. that brought the museum's most iconic paintings to an even wider British public. John Constable's 'The Hay Wain' (1821), the Romantic artist's best known landscape, revered in his native England as an authentic image of its rural countryside, was among the works acclaimed as national treasures, and is now back in London as part of the recently reinstalled collection. The peaceful, unassuming canvas's radically new technique, its profound redefinition of what landscape painting could be, and Constable's inherently moral approach to the genre's naturalistic representation would preoccupy him throughout his career.
Constable (1776-1837) grew up in East Bergholt, a small village in Suffolk along the River Stour in East Anglia. His father, who had inherited the local Flatford Mill, plied his prosperous trade along the river's canals, which afforded his family a genteel country life. Though the artist studied at London's Royal Academy as early as 1799, he often returned to draw and paint the fertile green fields and placid river scenes that viewers recognized even during his lifetime as 'Constable Country.' After his marriage in 1816, however, he moved permanently to London, and was elected associate of the Royal Academy in 1819. Constable also exhibited that year the first of his so-called Six-Footers, the monumental River Stour scenes that were painted in his London studio and were his bid for fame.