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.”