Discover Constable is a chance to see one of Britain’s most beloved paintings up close

As evocations of England’s rural idyll go, John Constable’s The Hay Wain (1821), a paean to the Suffolk of his childhood, is up there with village greens, cream teas and leather on willow. It is just as familiar from prints on tea trays and biscuit tins as it is from the National Gallery, where it is one of the most beloved pictures.

Given its confirmed status as a byword for cosy English kitsch, it’s perhaps surprising to learn that 100 years ago, The Hay Wain garnered a rapturous reception at the 1824 Paris Salon, where it was feted by the avant-garde and the king, who presented Constable with a gold medal. The painting remained in France until after the artist’s death in 1837, and was eventually donated to the National Gallery in 1886.

Back in London after being shown in Bristol over the summer, The Hay Wain is now the centrepiece in the National Gallery’s first-ever loan exhibition on Constable. Comprising around 50 works by Constable and related artists, the compact show is titled Discover Constable & The Hay Wain, a promise that it doesn’t quite deliver on, despite a neatly ordered structure that places the painting in its social, political and artistic context.

The painting’s charm is beyond doubt, but precisely what it was that got the French crowds so excited is a lot harder to understand. Théodore Géricault, who had caused a stir a few years earlier with his controversial The Raft of the Medusa (1818-19), was “quite stunned” by it, and the Louvre lost no time in trying to buy The Hay Wain for the nation – Constable himself declared, in his own rather pipe-and-slippers manner, that The Hay Wain had “rather a more novel look than I expected”. 

Still, you have to look to the complaints of the London critics a couple of years previously to get a sense of what the fuss was about. The brushwork, said one critic, was “a little too spotty”, another took against the artist’s “excess of piebald scambling [sic] in the finishing”. But as the curators point out, today, Constable’s loose brushwork, thick applications of glossy paint, and the flashes of brilliant white paint that suggest the sparkle of sunlight, won’t strike anyone as radical, and if anything look positively restrained next to the bravura paint handling of the Impressionists, and Constable’s exact contemporary JMW Turner.

Turner is represented here by one small watercolour, but it’s more than enough to identify him as the swashbuckling radical to Constable’s straight man. Turner experimented with materials, colour and technique, and unlike Constable, who as the son of a prosperous mill owner was, in The Hay Wain, surveying his family’s land, Turner came from more modest London stock. An intrepid traveller, whose paintings reveal his fascination with the dirt and noise of the Industrial Revolution, he couldn’t be more different from Constable, whose Hay Wain was nostalgic even as he was painting it.

Divided into four sections, the exhibition tries to show how Constable’s painting challenged the prevailing approaches to landscape painting. Though traditionally viewed as an inferior genre, lacking the didactic content of history painting, landscape had gained popularity with the rise of the grand country estate, the revered 17th century French painter Claude Lorrain setting the standard for an elevated take on the genre. Prized by aristocrats, their tastes shaped by the Grand Tour, Claude connected landscape painting to the classical tradition, populating idealised landscapes with biblical, mythological and historical narratives. 

So powerful was his influence on contemporary aesthetics that the Claude Glass became a popular accessory, mentioned more than once by Jane Austen – a small, tinted convex mirror that, when reflecting a landscape, allowed tourists and artists to frame and admire a view in Claude’s ambered tones.

Also popular was the picturesque tradition of the Dutch Golden Age, in which an abundant and prosperous countryside is tended by contented rustics. Many English painters followed one or other tradition, and some like Gainsborough and later Turner absorbed both approaches to create a distinct style of their own.

What no one was doing was addressing the plight of the rural poor, and in this exhibition, among all these depictions of bucolic prosperity, a display of satirical prints allows a glimpse of a very different countryside, in which the working classes were ravaged by unemployment and rising food prices.

Constable’s life had been dominated from his teens by the Napoleonic Wars, while the French Revolution introduced the alarming possibility of bloody social reform. Add to this the impact of crop failures across Europe, the privatisation of farm land, industrialisation, and urbanisation, it is perhaps no wonder that some, like Constable, chose to cling to the comforting certainties offered by scenes of timeless rural contentment.

Constable can’t be accused of social realism, but he was certainly committed to naturalism, and was highly unusual in his day for painting out of doors, where he focused his attention on the details of familiar, ordinary life, and observation of the natural world.

Constable’s great achievement in The Hay Wain, and surely a factor in its immense popularity, is that unlike any of the other pictures here it looks less like a landscape painting, and more like an actual landscape. But though it is a million miles from the mystical epics infused with what one worried German critic called the “narcotic vapour” of European Romanticism, the painting draws on Romantic ideas of landscape – especially skies – as a carrier of emotion. And despite all those in situ sketches, the overall composition, put together in his London studio, is modelled on a well-known precedent by the Flemish old master, Rubens.

The exhibition’s inclusion of detailed preparatory works, including a full size oil sketch in which Constable works out the distribution of light and colour across the canvas, emphasises just how carefully he controlled the work. For him, naturalism did not relegate the painter to the role of dutiful amanuensis, copying what Mother Nature laid before him.

In fact, despite so much preparation, various changes include a barrel in the foreground, added and then painted out, but now visible through ageing paint, and the barking dog, added as an afterthought, and surely a deliberate – even mischievous – nod to the painting’s Dutch forebears.

Still, Constable resists the temptation to yield too far to external influences of any persuasion. One amusing example is A Cottage in a Cornfield (1817), which Constable unfashionably represents as perfectly neat and tidy, in contrast to the tumbledown rusticity favoured by his very popular contemporary George Morland, who in The Coming Storm, Isle of Wight (1789), channels a highly strung Romanticism via the Dutch picturesque to nerve-jangling effect.

Perhaps Constable’s radicalism is best understood in the title he gave his most famous painting, before it was renamed The Hay Wain. To Constable it was Landscape: Noon, which hints at the influence it would have on Monet, perhaps the ultimate, obsessive observer of changing light conditions. The time of day is a quiet act of rebellion, in which he rejects the deep shadows of morning and afternoon, most amenable to the honeyed tones of Claude. Instead, the blaze of midday sun gave Constable sparkling greens almost bleached to white in the foliage of the mid ground, an effect that seems to anticipate the imminent invention of photography. 

Read Next

It was this approach that caught the imagination of the French, inspiring the “plein air” work of the Barbizon painters (who included Manet, Millet, Degas and Rousseau), and ultimately, the Impressionists. 

This is the painting’s natural storyline, yet it is largely missing in this exhibition. In trying to celebrate the painting’s impact in England, the exhibition never quite hits on what made it radical. 

At the National Gallery, London to 2 February (nationalgallery.org.uk)