Constable in Bristol “Truth to Nature”

John Constable, The Hay Wain, 1821, The National Gallery, London.

The Hay Wain by John Constable is one of the paintings loaned by the National Gallery in London to its sister museums in the regions as part of the celebration of its 200th anniversary. Painted in 1821, The Hay Wain is an icon of English landscape art, widely reproduced, copied, satirised and politicised. The image it conveys - of rural tranquillity - was in fact painted at the height of the Industrial Revolution, a time when land was being sold after the Enclosures Acts and life was changing dramatically for many.

Truth to Nature, the exhibition built around the loan, examines how artists have seen the land as a place of refuge, but also as hostile to humans. It also seeks to show artists’ awareness of human destruction of the land, and to explore how landscape has inspired artists from Constable to the present day. It includes oil sketches by Constable from the Victoria & Albert Museum alongside many rarely seen pieces from Bristol Museum & Art Gallery’s extensive collection.

Constable’s work is contextualised with an early landscape from the 1600s by Jacob van Ruisdael, which how Constable’s devotion to naturalism signaled a departure from traditional approaches to landscape as a setting for religious or mythological images. Truth to Nature also shows Constable’s influence, with examples from the Bristol School and 19th century French art. Modernist landscapes from the 20th century by Christopher Wood and Ivon Hitchens sit alongside a conceptual land piece by Richard Long, and abstract landscape by the St Ives artist Peter Lanyon.