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.
How would we feel about Constable if he weren’t a staple of the National Gallery but could only be seen in Paris? Would he be the stuff of tea-towels, place mats and rural England then? Or would we see him as he was, as a radical and an influence on artists such as Manet and the Impressionists?
This exhibition, Discover Constable and the Hay Wain, is the fourth of the National Gallery’s series of putting its own pictures on display in context, showing the artistic environment for which they were created and the physical environment they came from. After seeing Turner – a genuine revolutionary – and Blake and Stubbs, we see Constable for the extraordinary artist that he was. At the end of this show there are pictures from his later period – cloudscapes and dark expressionistic work like the Monument to Sir Joshua Reynolds. If he weren’t English but French, wouldn’t we have seen his radicalism? And knowing that he was keenly appreciated in France in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, does it make us see him differently?
He was a local patriot, rejoicing in the East Anglian country he grew up in and the countrymen he came from, but he was also squarely a product of the prosperous classes. He immortalised the mill and William Lott’s house in The Hay Wain but what we don’t often notice is the extent to which this was a working landscape. There are workers in the fields in the distance, a fisherman on the river, a woman drawing water in addition to William Lott in his Haywain – without any hay - and the spaniel barking from the shore. It is not a peaceful environment; there is activity everywhere you look.
Constable’s father owned the mill on the river but William Lott was no starving peasant. He was a prosperous yeoman and his home is not a squalid cottage but a solid homestead, now rented out to tourists (lucky them). The scene seems timeless, but weare reminded here of the contested political and economic circumstances of the period against which Constable sets a vista of contented and purposeful equilibrium.
The beauty of this exhibition is that we look afresh at the familiar. We see the lovely preparatory sketches on blue paper from the Courtauld that he made for The Hay Wain. We see his other takes on the same landscape. We even see little figures of local singers he made as a youngster – probably.
The Hay Wain is one of Constable’s six footers, big canvases which give us the big picture and cause the viewer to feel part of the landscape he looks at. We are captivated by the sleepy river, but above it are what Constable called the messengers, the clouds, which he made his life’s study. Contemporaries saw the work as rough and unrefined, but that is precisely its charm. The Cornfield too, with its boy drinking from a stream, seems like a lane down which we too could wander, like Constable did on his way to school.
This is an exhibition to linger over, not least over the Hay Wain, which is always in the collection and has been since 1886. It is a genuine feat to make us look afresh at it, and to realise how lucky we are to have it. And you know what: the great thing is, this exhibition is free.
