Hi, my name is Lucy Chiswell. I'm the Dorset Curatorial Fellow for Paintings
from 1600 to 1800 at the National Gallery, and today I'm going to talk to
you about three landscapes in the National Gallery collection from the
comfort of my own sitting room. This is in a bid to celebrate the outside world.
As you all know spring is a time for nature to really draw attention to
itself, blossoming and blooming into vibrant colour, and although it's harder
for us to access nature at this current moment, I thought this was precisely
why we should look at it using the paintings perhaps as a means through
which we can access the outside world, or simply just as a reminder to appreciate
it when and where we can. So I'm going to talk about three landscape paintings,
depicting three different times of day, starting with the early morning. So we're
starting in the very early morning here, with this beautiful landscape painting
by Peter Paul Rubens, the great Flemish 17th century artist. I've always been
drawn to this painting, mainly because of its sheer scale. Now, another thing that
draws me to the painting is the very unusual perspective with which Rubens is
painting this landscape. We're not standing within it, we are kind of
looking down and into the landscape, which very much draws you into the
picture he composes. The picture of these horizontal bands of colour. So the bottom
half of the painting is kind of composed of this reddish-brown tone, with this
very strong accent of red on the blouse of the lady riding to the market
in her cart. And this transitions then into a kind of pastel green, greenish
yellow colour, where we see these long shadows cast by trees from the early
morning sun, which then transitions in turn into a very hazy blue distance which
makes up this sort of infinite horizon. The sky of course is golden in the early
morning sunshine. So we have these very strong bands of colour, and I always think
that it reminds me slightly of the Abstract Expressionists who had to come
about 300 years later - this way of kind of drawing us into
the picture in these very kind of meditative colour fields. Now Rubens is an
artist who enjoyed an incredibly successful and prosperous career. He had
a very successful workshop in Antwerp, and he worked for a number of different
rulers and kings and queens around Europe. But in 1630 he returns to his
home in Antwerp, and he purchases this 16th-century manor house called Het
Steen, which we can see on the left hand side of the picture here.
And he retreats there in the summer months from 1635 when he buys
the manor house, to his death in 1640, and he uses it as a as a kind of retreat,
from which he can really immerse himself in the Flemish landscape. And he paints
these pictures really for himself, rather than for sale, or for any particular
patron. Now until this moment, landscape painting had usually been used as a kind
of scenery, or backdrop, to a narrative, whereas in the 17th century, Dutch and
Flemish artists were particularly keen to make landscape the protagonist of the
picture, and to celebrate it in its own right.
And we very much see Rubens doing that here. That said he very much enlivens the
composition with a number of figures, and we can see this lovely huntsman
crouching beneath this sprawling blackberry bush in the foreground here,
with his lurcher by his side, ready to take on the unassuming partridges
that we see beyond the beyond the stump of the tree there. But
what happens is he starts this incredible trail of trees, that again
pull us down into the back of the painting.
Another detail I really love is the glint of the light reflecting on the
glazed windows in the manor house. So that transitions us rather nicely into
the 19th century in England, and the transition is
made even stronger, because this painting, which I'm sure is incredibly familiar to
many of you, one of the most famous paintings in the National Gallery
collection, and indeed in the country, or perhaps even the world, this is the Hay
Wain by John Constable, painted in 1821. And it's connection to the Rubens is
particularly interesting, because Constable actually admired Rubens 'View
from Het Steen' in the collection of Beaumont with whom
Constable was particularly friendly. And it brings us to the middle of the day, to
midday, and we know that because this picture was submitted to the Royal
Academy in 1821 with the title 'Landscape: Noon' and it was subsequently given the
nickname 'The Hay Wain' in reference to this wagon that we can see making its
way into the centre of the composition. Now, like Rubens, Constable
here is painting somewhere that is very close to his own heart. He is painting a
scene not far from his own home, or in his home County Suffolk. This is
Flatford Mill. It's a scene that we are very familiar with from Constable's
compositions, and it was a mill, a corn grinding mill, that was owned by his
father, and had been in the Constable family for over a hundred years. And we
see the mill pond here. We don't get a view of the mill itself, which is sort of
on the right-hand side, beyond the picture, and we have this lovely little
cottage on the left, which was owned by a gentleman called Willy Lot, who was a
tenant farmer who lived there for his entire life.
So it's a very gentle scene, very much in
admiration of the Dutch and Flemish painters of the 17th century, 200 years
before. But what I've always loved about 'The Hay Wain' is the conversation and the
dialogue between the natural elements in the painting. Of course we have to have
Constable's distinctive clouds, and I love the way they transition
from this kind of very crisp, nebulous white, to this very smoky, ethereal and
fog on the left-hand side of the painting, which casts a very dull light
on the trees beneath it, where is the brightness and the light coming from the
clouds, we see very much reflected in the calm cool mill pond below. We see
Constable being very economic with his use of white paint, in order to give a
sense of this iridescent, kind of shimmering, calm pond below. A particular
reflection I love is that there is a lady, leaning from the jetty outside of
the cottage, and you can see her reaching her arm into the water, and there's a
very small ripple of water around her arm as it enters, as it plunges into the
water, and we can see the reflection, very gentle reflection, of her red blouse
and her arm in the water below. So when this painting was exhibited at the Royal
Academy in 1821, it didn't meet a huge amount of success, incredibly
surprisingly, and that's because landscape was really quite an inferior
genre in painting in the early 19th century in England. That said it was very
much admired by the French academic painter Théodore Géricault, who
reported back to France how beautiful this painting was. Subsequently the
painting was sent to Paris in 1824, where it was exhibited at the
Paris Salon, and it was awarded a gold medal by the King of France. Now this
brings us to our final scene, our night scene, painted in France by the French
painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot in around 1858. Now this painting is one in
a series of four paintings, all in the National Gallery collection, that depicts
the different times of the day. And this was a very popular theme in the
19th century in France, as it gave artists an opportunity to experiment
with the effects of light throughout the day, and I think the most striking
element of this painting is not only it's very
unusual format for a landscape painting, this kind of tall narrow format, but it
is the light, this soft light that emanates from this small moon, which is
positioned almost centrally in the composition, illuminating the night sky
above it, and emitting this kind of gentle glow onto the path in the
foreground. I particularly love how the moon just catches the bright red cap
worn by this sort of lone figure, walking towards us with his dog, and down the
path in the foreground. I also love how the trees plunge upwards into this
incredibly powerful night sky that takes up almost half of the composition,
drawing our eye up towards these tiny flecks of white paint to give the
impression of a starry sky. Now Corot was a part of a group of painters known as
the Barbizon School of painters, who were working in and around the village of
Barbizon in the Fontainebleau forest just outside of Paris, and they were
known for their paintings of landscape scenes, of rural scenes and paintings of
outdoor life, often painting these in the landscape itself. Corot's late works were
imbued with a real sense of mood, and atmosphere, and they were incredibly
revered by collectors. This series of works was in fact purchased by the
19th century British artist Frederick Lord Leighton, who was later
president of the Royal Academy, and they hung in Holland Park in West London in
his drawing room, and they hung alongside an oil study by John Constable, alongside
which I think they would have looked rather lovely.
If you're interested in
learning more about art history, click here, or here. Thank you very much for
watching, and we'll see you next time.
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