John Constable, The Hay Wain

The Romantics saw nature as ever-changing, unpredictable, and uncontrollable, and they interpreted its many aspects as analogous to equally unpredictable and changeable human moods and emotions. They found nature awesome, fascinating, powerful, domestic, and delightful. The landscape became perhaps the most important visual vehicle for Romantic thought.

John Constable (1776-1837), the son of a successful miller, claimed that the quiet domestic landscape of his youth in southern England had made him a painter before he ever picked up a paintbrush. Although he was trained at the Royal Academy, he was equally influenced by the British topographic watercolor tradition of the late eighteenth century and by seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting. After moving to London in 1816, he dedicated himself to painting monumental views of the agricultural landscape, which he considered as important as history painting. Constable’s commitment to contemporary English subjects was so strong that he opposed the establishment of the English National Gallery of Art in 1832 on the grounds that it might distract painters by enticing them to paint foreign or ancient themes in unnatural styles.

The Hay Wain, of 1821 shows a quiet, slow-moving scene from Constable’s England. It has the fresh color and sense of visual exactitude that persuades viewers to believe that it must have been painted directly from nature. Constable made numerous drawings and small-scale color studies for his open-air paintings, but the final works were carefully constructed images produced in the studio. The paintings are very large even for landscape themes of historic importance, never mind views derived from the local landscape. The Hay Wain represents England as Constable imagined it had been for centuries – comfortable, rural, and idyllic. Even the carefully rendered and meteorologically correct details of the sky seem natural. The painting is, however, deeply nostalgic, harking back to an agrarian past that was fast disappearing in industrializing England.^[1]