183 Constable, The Haywain
Pippa Couch and Rachel Ropeik provide a description, historical perspective, and analysis of Cimabue’s Maesta of Santa Trinita.
John Constable, The Hay Wain, 1821, oil on canvas, 51-1/4 × 73 inches (National Gallery of Art, London)
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Reviving Landscape Painting
Studying the English painter John Constable is helpful in understanding the changing meaning of nature during the industrial revolution. He is, in fact, largely responsible for reviving the importance of landscape painting in the nineteenth century. A key event, when it is remembered that landscape would become the primary subject of the Impressionists later in the century.
Landscape had had a brief moment of glory amongst the Dutch masters of the seventeenth century. Ruisdael and others had devoted large canvases to the depiction of the low countries. But in the eighteenth century hierarchy of subject matter, landscape was nearly the lowest type of painting. Only the still-life was considered less important. This would change in the first decades of the nineteenth century when Constable began to depict his father’s farm on oversized six-foot long canvases. These “six-footers” as they are called, challenged the status quo. Here landscape was presented on the scale of history painting.
Why would Constable take such a bold step, and perhaps more to the point, why were his canvases celebrated (and they were, by no less important a figure than Eugene Delacroix, when Constable’s The Hay Wain was exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1824)?
Painted in the Studio, from Sketches Done Out-of-Doors
The Hay Wain, does include an element of genre (the depiction of a common scene), that is the farm hand taking his horse and wagon (or wain) across the stream. But this action is minor and seems to offer the viewer the barest of pretenses for what is virtually a pure landscape. Unlike the later Impressionists, Constable’s large polished canvases were painted in his studio. He did, however, sketch outside, directly before his subject. This was necessary for Constable as he sought a high degree of accuracy in many specifics. For instance, the wagon and tack (harness, etc.) are all clearly and specifically depicted, The trees are identifiable by species, and Constable was the first artist we know of who studied meteorology so that the clouds and the atmospheric conditions that he rendered were scientifically precise.
Constable was clearly the product of the Age of Enlightenment and its increasing confidence in science. But Constable was also deeply influenced by the social and economic impact of the industrial revolution.
From Farming to Factories, From Country to City
Prior to the nineteenth century, even the largest European cities counted their populations only in the hundreds of thousands. These were mere towns by today’s standards. But this would change rapidly. The world’s economies had always been based largely on agriculture. Farming was a labor intensive enterprise a