Constable, The Hay Wain (Landscape: Noon)

0:06Dr. Steven Zucker: We're in the National Gallery in London looking at one of John Constable's six footers. Dr. Beth Harris: The six footers are a series of paintings that are six feet wide. And this was an unusual size for landscape paintings in the early 19th century.

0:21The date of this painting is 1821. Dr. Steven Zucker: The original title was Landscape: Noon, but it's now known universally as the Hay Wain. And I think it's hard for us to retrieve how radical it was to put forward as your subject at this scale nature. Dr. Beth Harris: Landscape painting was one of the lowliest subjects according to the Royal Academy here in London, because it was the idea of painting something that was right in front of you, just like painting a portrait was something right in front of you.

0:49Dr. Steven Zucker: So important history subjects, religious subjects, they were often quite large, and less important subjects. Landscape, still lives, they were painted on smaller canvases. Dr. Beth Harris: So Constable is being ambitious here, which might seem funny because the subject seems so very mundane.

1:05What we're looking at is a view of the Stour River where Constable grew up and hay wain, a cart, moving through that river with a woman in the background doing some washing, a dog barking, some farmers working in the field in the background, the clouds passing in the sky at noon.

1:23Dr. Steven Zucker: So what is Constable heroicizing with the scale of this canvas? Dr. Beth Harris: Constable's father was a landowner, and Constable came from a well-to-do family in rural Suffolk in England. This is a moment when the land in the countryside is fraught, when there are very severe economic stresses and unemployment among the workers.

1:45Dr. Steven Zucker: In the early Industrial Revolution, machines were perceived to be taking employment away. There was great poverty, but we see none of that here. Dr. Beth Harris: Landscapes are expected to be classical and beautiful, to show us something idealized, but Constable is refusing to idealize here.

2:00Dr. Steven Zucker: If Constable is looking back to any art history, he's looking back to the Dutch, to artists like Ruisdael. Look at the amount of this canvas that's given over to the sky. Constable had studied meteorology, which was a new subject. Dr. Beth Harris: And that specificity of Dutch painting, capturing a time of day.

2:17The title of this painting is Noon. Specifics that are very much opposite of the idealizing tradition that was recommended by the Academy. Dr. Steven Zucker: And in that way, there is a subtle political undercurrent. However, we're not close to the workers. We don't actually see their faces.

2:33Dr. Beth Harris: The farmers in the background have become one with nature. There's no sense of the landscape of nature being something that's fraught at this moment. Dr. Steven Zucker: The artist was creating a new kind of beauty, finding beauty even in the most lowly.

2:47That was an expression of his personal experience. Dr. Beth Harris: And I think that's what makes this romantic. When we talk about the style of Romanticism in England, we're thinking about a kind of art that is personal, that is emotional. And we have this lovely quote from Constable about this.

3:04He said, writing to a friend, "The sound of water escaping from mill dams, willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts, and brickwork. I love such things. As long as I do paint, I shall never cease to paint such places. They have always been my delight. Still, I should paint my own places best.

3:25Painting is with me but another word for feeling, and I associate my careless boyhood with all that lies on the banks of the Stour. These scenes made me a painter, and I am grateful. That is, I'd often thought of pictures of them before I ever touched a pencil."

3:41So you can think about this painting as Constable loving this landscape so much, being so intimately familiar with it. Dr. Steven Zucker: But even as this painting is about his personal, subjective experience, his memories, it's also a painting that is fixed in a very particular historical moment.

3:58Because of industrialization and because of the growth of cities, nature has taken on a meaning because it is now removed from people's everyday experiences, at least those that would have seen this painting in the Royal Academy in London. Dr. Beth Harris: There's certainly real nostalgia here.

4:14Dr. Steven Zucker: The six footers were well received, but the criticism that always comes through is the lack of finish, which was so different from the prevailing traditions in the Academy at this time. Dr. Beth Harris: Where everything had to be smoothly painted, where you were not supposed to see the hand of the artist.

4:28Dr. Steven Zucker: Constable was deliberate in creating a rough surface that he felt captured the variety of textures of nature that he was seeing. Dr. Beth Harris: We can feel the paint moving across the surface in the currents of the water, for example. Dr. Steven Zucker: And the movement of those billowing clouds.

4:45But in some ways, the painting is also very traditional. For instance, in its composition. We're let in from the lower right, and we arc slowly across the foreground towards the left, and then circle back through the broadly lit fields and then up into the clouds.

4:59Dr. Beth Harris: And so it is a fiction that Constable is giving us. This may appear to be a snapshot of a view on the river, but this is actually something very carefully composed in the artist's studio in the city of London. Dr. Steven Zucker: From oil sketches that the artist had done outside.

5:13It's a distillation of his memory, of his experience, and of his skill.