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Audio Stop 701

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We look out onto a landscape with low, grassy hills to the left, a lake to the right, and a brick building in the center distance below a sky filled with towering white clouds in this horizontal painting. A wooden fence closer to us crosses the landscape from the lower left corner and disappears where the land slopes down to meet the water at the center of the painting. Several black and white cows graze in the field beyond the fence to our left. Two men in a wooden boat pull in nets on the lake to our right near a pair of swans. The lake crosses the composition in the near distance, disappearing into a culvert farther back. A donkey pulls a small carriage with two people near a bridge that crosses the lake in the distance to our left. The brick manor house is visible through a break in the full, deep green trees that line the horizon, which comes halfway up the composition. The clouds cast noticeable shadows in the brightly sunlit scene.

John Constable

Wivenhoe Park, Essex, 1816

West Building, Main Floor - Gallery 57

A pleasant sense of ease and harmony pervades this landscape of almost photographic clarity. The large areas of brilliant sunshine and cool shade, the rambling line of the fence, and the balance of trees, meadow, and river are evidence of the artist’s creative synthesis of the actual site. The precision of John Constable’s brushwork, seen in the animals, birds, and people, lends importance to these smaller details. His deep, consuming attachment to the landscape of this rural area is a constant factor in his works, and his studies and sketchbooks reveal his complete absorption in the pictorial elements of his native countryside.

Read full audio transcript

NARRATOR:
In 1816, The English artist John Constable painted this expansive view of Wivenhoe Park, Essex, the estate of General Rebow, an old family friend. Constable believed in what he called “natural painting”—he wanted to give the viewer a sense of standing before the actual scene.

To capture the fleeting play of light and shadow, he sometimes set up his canvas out of doors, applying precise little touches of thick, opaque oil paint. Constable lived at the estate while he worked, writing letters to his fiancee on his progress. “I live in the park,” he declares genially. “And Mrs. Rebow says I am very unsociable.” As a professional artist, he went to great lengths to please his patrons--even if this meant literally adding more canvas in the middle of a job.

Curator Franklin Kelly.

FRANKLIN KELLY:
“We know from his letters that he wrote back to his wife that after beginning the painting he found out that he did not have enough room on the canvas to get in everything that the family wanted shown. So in fact, he added three inches on each side; and to try to minimize the seam that was inevitable when one does that, on the left he added another cow, down towards the bottom, which is the attempt to sort of visually distract you from the seam running up and down. And on the right, he added what is one of the most beautiful passages of the painting, which is the small boat with two men who are setting a fishnet in the lake.”

“This painting has always been admired for its naturalness and its sense of reality. But it’s striking when one actually looks at it and tries to imagine exactly how, for instance, you might take a photograph of this spot, how remarkably different it is. It’s almost like a wide-angle photograph but without any of the distortion that occurs in that process. Everything is clear, the perspective all makes sense as a whole, and yet is in an arrangement that could not possibly be recreated simply by standing there because the artist has made adjustments, has changed the positioning of trees, has enhanced shadows and reflections in a way that make it seem real, but are not themselves necessarily the actual facts of reality.”

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