Constable’s ‘The Hay Wain’: A Quiet but Radical British Icon

Experience the National Gallery's collection like never before with our new exclusive 'National Treasures' film series. A key strand of the National Gallery's Bicentenary celebrations, we will discover 12 paintings which will be loaned from the Gallery's collection to partner venues throughout the UK, providing expert commentary on these iconic masterpieces.

'The Hay Wain' (1821) by John Constable (1776–1837) will be familiar to many as capturing quintessential English life in the Suffolk countryside. But does this familiarity stop us from seeing how radical this landscape picture was at the time it was made? Curator Mary McMahon shows us the artist's innovations.

The traditional, academic hierarchy of artistic genres still held weight in Constable’s time, which did not favour landscape painters. However, Thomas Gainsborough had paved the way in the previous generation of painters for those that followed, to pursue landscapes as worthy subject matter.

Constable painted Willy Lott’s House, located next to Flatford Mill which his family had leased for nearly a century, a number of times over many years. From his London studio, he would later work from sketches and studies to create 'The Hay Wain'.

His brushwork was loose and broad for the time, and he drew directly from nature for his bright colour palette. This distinguished him from the works of earlier great artists.