Hello and welcome to the National Gallery. I'm Dr Emily Burns, the Vivmar Curatorial Fellow,
and we're standing in Room 34, which is where we keep most of the
British paintings in the Collection. So we're surrounded by works by
Gainsborough, Turner, Lawrence, and John Constable. I'm standing in front of
'The Hay Wain' by John Constable, painted in 1821. We can see his signature and
date here. And it may be familiar to you, it's one of the most iconic paintings in
the history of British art. But it was actually extremely radical for its day
although through modern eyes it seems more of a conventional landscape
painting. So I hope in this short talk I can unpick for you how important this
painting was and how influential it was. To tell you a little bit about John
Constable, he was born in Suffolk in East Bergholt, and he had a reasonably
wealthy upbringing. His parents were millers and merchants, and he remained
very close to that area for the rest of his life, in heart even if not in person.
He painted scenes like this of the Suffolk countryside, and this was
what meant the most to him. He was a sort of amateur painter when he began and he
met a very important person called Sir George Beaumont who had influence on him
because he had an impressive Old Master collection, which inspired Constables'
early painting career so much, so that he encouraged by his parents to let him go
to London, and study at the Royal Academy of Arts when he was 24. And at the Royal
Academy he was taught the hierarchy of genre of painting, and that begins with
history painting which is narrative painting of religious and historical
subjects, and then further down the rung is portraiture and then landscape
painting and genre painting. Now he did paint portraits to make money but what
he wanted to do was landscape painting such as this of his beloved Suffolk
countryside. This is one of what he called his six-footers which are
enormous monumental landscapes of scenes by the River Stour which we see here.
It was exhibited at the gallery in 1821. What we see is a hay wain crossing a
very shallow ford across the way to the fields behind where we see people at
work with pitchforks and scythes, piling up hay into a wagon that's already there.
So it's a working landscape. The people are not incidental to the picture,
they're part of the picture, and it's also a very familiar landscape.
This is the edge of Flatford Mill, you can just see the bricks in the corner.
His family actually owned the mill, and then across the way from the mill pond
is this house owned by a man called Willie Lott, who he also would have known.
But the picture, although it's a familiar one, is actually artificially made in
many ways. It was painted at great speed in his London studio, from a compilation
of sketches which had been some over 10 years old. He couldn't go back to the
Suffolk countryside. He had five months to paint this thing, and he did it as
fast as he could. He had to write back to get someone else to do a study of a hay
wain. They actually depicted a wood cart, rather than a hay cart, which is why the
sides are a little bit lower, so it's not completely accurate, but still convincing
nonetheless. And he did other studies, of these sort of sections of the
landscape which he knew and loved. He also would have been influenced by the
Dutch and Flemish Old Masters such as van Goyen and Siberechts. He owned
some of these paintings, and he would have seen others in galleries, and in other
people's possession, and they painted pictures such as wagons crossing streams,
and fords, so it's already in the art historical tradition, as well as being an
accurate scene. He also did many many cloud studies, sky studies, Constables'
skies are very famous, and this is reflected here. The title of the piece
was actually originally 'Landscape Noon', so it's a time of day. And and his
painting of clouds has influenced artists after him. He moved a Hampstead
because of his wife's health and in 1820 to 1821, and there are many many cloud
studies, lots of sky studies, that are a meteorologists dream because they're
actually accurate. Something radical about this painting is it's painted in
bright green, which is very realistic and close to nature. And that was
very important to Constable, because other painters at the time would paint
landscapes that were much more brown because they were influenced and based
on the Old Masters which were muddy and dirtier because they'd been in rooms
with fires and smoke in, and so it was almost a surprise that he was painting
actually the colours of the trees themselves, as we saw them. And again with
an eye for composition, he added accents of colour such as red. Constable's
very fond of adding a red accent to balance out this gorgeous green. He also
has a kind of novel way of painting. Rather than painting the individual
leaves, he splotches the paint on, and so when you look up closely, it's actually
very loose, and broad handling, and the same applies to the way he's depicted
the water here. He's scraped paint across the canvas in
a very broad fashion, which is just quite contemporary, and unusual at the time, so
when it was exhibited, it didn't have a much of a critical
reception in England. But to French visitors came Charles Nodier, he was a
romantic writer, and Géricault the painter, and they saw the picture and thought it
was incredible, and went back and spread the word so much so that hype built up
in France. And when the picture was exhibited again at the British
Institution in 1822, the French art dealer John Arrowsmith persuaded Constable to
take the painting to the Louvre, and show at the French Royal Academy exhibition
in 1824. And here it was a great sensation. The artist Delacroix went
twice, and went back and repainted sections of his 'Massacre de Chios' with
bright bolts of colour, just as Constable had shown bright green here, and stabs of
red to balance out the colour scheme of his picture. And the curator of the
Louvre at the time said that Constable was the Messiah of landscape painting,
and this is quite a claim. Now through the art of Delacroix and Jericho, but
also other people who saw it, this painting influenced the art of the
Barbizon painters, and through them the Impressionists, and really changed the
attitudes about painting natural landscapes, not painting such contrived
ones - which is interesting because in many ways, this is
realistic and an artificial landscape made up of individual components. We've
done some scientific analysis of the picture, and Constable has really paid
attention to the structure of the composition. He's put a boat here which
wasn't in the original sketches because he clearly wanted to balance out the
scene, and the weighting of the picture. He's also had added a horse and rider
here, which have since been painted over, and then over that a barrel, which has
also since been painted over, so now we're left with the ghostly outline you
can slightly see through the paints. But the main thrust of the action is of
course the wagon going through the countryside, and it's a quiet, relaxing,
gentle scene that really shook the landscape painting world. So I hope you
enjoyed this talk, and I hope you might be able to visit the National Gallery
soon, thank you very much. If you'd like to find out more about our Collection
click here or here. Thanks for watching, see you next time.