Where’s the mud?
The National Gallery will display John Constable’s famous painting ‘The Hay Wain’ as a “contested landscape” at an upcoming exhibition.
The 1821 painting is a British classic, depicting a rural landscape near Constable’s native Suffolk. The idyllic scene shows a cart and horse travelling through the tranquil River Stour.
But some critics say the painting conceals a dark secret. Not present in the scene are the poorer workers of the time, many of whom were suffering from hunger and poverty.
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The new exhibition will attempt to explain the full social context of the painting. It will be displayed alongside satirical images from the period which give another perspective on the politics of the time.
I think I would find that interesting, at least if it were done well. It doesn’t seem quite as much pointing out the obvious as the “Oh no the Albert Memorial is reactionary” item does.
Maybe that’s because I tend to react to idyllic rural scenes the same way myself. If they’re too idyllic I tend to want some mucky pigs somewhere in the picture.
Yeah, I’m not too big on idyllic pastoral scenes, either. Guess because I grew up in that sort of place and I know it doesn’t look like that.
Who ever said artists have to portray things realistically, in context, forgetting nothing? How arrogant.
I can see someone being offended by what’s there, but being offended by what’s *not* there is some next level silliness. “In context” is a very slippery slope, and not possible. Art works aren’t required to meet some standard of objectivity, ffs.
Reminds me of that NPR stupidity complaining about a proposed tv show that was just footage of the countryside from a train (which sounds lovely btw); something about poor or indigenous people who have trauma associated with said landscapes.
Art is aesthetics not reality.
Everything I know about art I learned from Monty Python: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBS_twXhI30
There is always Turner’s “Ploughing Up Turnips, near Slough”.
I am no art historian, but 1821 was smack dab in the middle of the Romantic period, wasn’t it? Why not just tell people what that was? They were into the beauty of nature, and they idealized stuff. It’s what they did. They weren’t doing social commentary. There’s no need to apologize for it.
Lady Mondegreen is absolutely right — idealising Nature (with a captal ’N’) as something greater than human beings was very much part of Romanticism in all its forms (Wordsworth, for example), though Constable – unlike Turner – tends to prefer more ‘human’ landscapes. Before Romanticism, there were the 17th & 18th century landscapes that harked back very obviously and nostalgically to the pastoral tradition in poetry – ‘Nymphs & shepherds dance no more/ By sandy Ladon’s lilied banks…’), or the landscapes that seemed to be painted from the point of view of a landowner, high up and fondly contemplating his domain. And it is also the case that Chinese & Japanese landscape painting (which I hugely admire) was idealised, although in a very different (mostly Taoist) way.
I see no problem with providing some sort of ‘context’ to any work of art, so long as it is thoughtful & illuminating, and not a sort of dissolution of the quiddity of works of art into sets of economic, social, and institutional influences which are regarded as wholly determining the works. John Barrell has some fine books on landscape painting, and on that marvellous poet John Clare, the son of an impoverished farm labourer who still has not had his due.
Peter N, I much enjoyed the Monty Python sketch.
What Tim said.
I generally do like informative panels in museums and galleries, myself. The dramatics about the Albert memorial are absurd because it’s so blindingly obvious how grotesque it is.
There’s this one too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9Aj7W3g1qo
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From the website Mutual art, on Turner’s ‘Turnios’:
‘The last decades of the eighteenth century saw a resurgence in paintings of the English agricultural landscape, coinciding with a period of intense transformation in the rural scene. Between about 1770 and 1815 significant changes occurred in farming methods and technology, as well as in land ownership and use.(5) The most profound of these changes was the culmination of the enclosure movement, in which traditional open fields farmed by all members of the local community were broken into discrete parcels of property, and untilled wastes and commons were consolidated into private farms. Enclosures were intended to facilitate new methods of farming in the interest of increasing agricultural productivity. They not only changed the use and appearance of the land, however, but also altered the social relations of the rural inhabitants. The transition from subsistence farming to more intense, market-driven agriculture made possible by enclosures left great numbers entirely dependent on wage labor and placed them increasingly under the control of the landowners and farmers who hired them. As enclosures led to growing economic disparity between landowners and laborers, class tensions were heightened. Much of the most interesting recent scholarship on English landscape painting has addressed the ideological role played by images of the agricultural landscape in masking these social tensions, obscuring the economic ramifications of enclosure, and naturalizing existing class relations.’
And having spent five years of my youth labouring on farms, I know well how toilsome an occupation it can be. I think the worst job was picking brussels sprouts on piece-work in Bedfordshire for the Christmas market, with ice in the sprouts cutting your frozen hands (wearing gloves slowed you down and lowered your wages), a bitter east wind blowing across the flat land, and an aching back from an old sports injury. But the countryside can be lovely, and I remember on a hill in Wales rising early and in the gloaming seeing everything below covered with luminous white clouds with a few small peaks rising above them. Hard labour and a feeling for the beauty of a scene are not mutually exclusive.
Art & enclosure would be a hella good exhibit…and I’m pretty sure there have been some.
I don’t know about exhibitions, but here are two of John Barrell’s books:
The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730-1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare. Cambridge University Press, 1972.
The Dark Side of the Landscape: the Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730-1840. Cambridge University Press, 1980.