Not boasting or anything but I grew up with Constable. My grandmother had a copy of The Hay Wain in her sitting room and I rather think there was a copy of The Cornfield as well. So whenever I come across The Hay Wain it’s like encountering an old friend.
And that is precisely the problem. The difficulty for us is reimagining Constable as his contemporaries saw him, as the French saw him – as someone who was radical in his painting, loose and free in his technique, utterly different from the staid classicism of the David School. When The Hay Wain was exhibited in Paris in 1824, the critics were blown away by this utterly different take on painting and the Director of the Louvre tried to obtain it for its collection.
