John Constable 1776–1837
NG 1207 
The Hay Wain

Judy Egerton, 2000

Extracted from:
Judy Egerton, The British Paintings (London: National Gallery Company and Yale University Press, 2000).

exhibited 1821

Oil on canvas, 130.2 × 185.4 cm (51¼ × 73 in.)

Inscribed John Constable pinx.^t London 1821.

Provenance

Purchased from the artist and taken to Paris in 1824 by the Anglo‐French dealer John Arrowsmith; reputedly sold by him in 1825 to an anon. client (possibly to another dealer, the disposal of his stock being enforced by financial difficulties); anon. sale, Henry, Paris, 31 March–1 April 1828 (additional lot, unnumbered),¹ bt by the impresario and collector Jean‐François Boursault;² among 80 pictures from Boursault’s collection purchased c. 1838 by Henry Artaria for the collection of Edmund Higginson, Saltmarsh Castle, Herefordshire;³ Higginson sale, Christie’s June ⁴ 4 1846 (77, bt by the dealer Thomas Rought; subsequently with the dealer D.T. White, from whom purchased by 1853 by George Young;⁴ his sale Christie’s 19 May 1866 (25), bt Cox for Henry Vaughan, by whom presented to the National Gallery 1886.

Exhibited

RA 1821 (339, ‘Landscape: Noon’); BI 1822 (197, ‘Landscape; Noon’); Paris, Salon de 1824 (358, ‘Une charrette à foin traversant un gué au pied d’une ferme; paysage’); BI , Winter 1853 (163); BFAC , Old Masters, 1871 (39); RA Winter 1871 (16); RA Winter 1886 (153); Tate Gallery 1937 (45); Paris 1938 (22); Chicago, New York and Toronto 1946–7 (21); NG , Cleaned Pictures, 1947 (87); Paris 1948 [not in catalogue]; RA 1951–2 (215); Paris 1972 (51); Tate Gallery 1976 (192); Tate Gallery 1991 (101).

Literature

Davies 1946, pp. 23–6; R.B. Beckett, ‘Constable and France’, Connoisseur, May 1956, pp. 249–55; Davies 1959, pp. 12–15; Reynolds 1960, pp. 24–7, 71–2 (nos. 110–110a, plate 65), 131–3 (plate 159); Parris, Fleming‐Williams and Shields exh. cat. 1976, pp. 119–21; Smart and Brooks 1976, pp. 80–91 (and detailed topographical notes pp. 135–7); Barrell 1980, pp. 146–9; Paulson 1982, pp. 112, 117–18, 120–1; Rosenthal 1983, pp. 124–32 (colour detail pp. 130–1); Reynolds 1984, pp. 67–9, cat. no. 21.1, plate 213; Cormack 1986, pp. 128–33; Bermingham 1987, pp. 138–9, 141–2; Parris and Fleming‐Williams 1991, pp. 203–5.

Engraved

Not engraved in Constable’s lifetime. S.W. Reynolds’s proposal in 1824 to go to France to engrave (or supervise) a mezzotint plate came to nothing, perhaps because the picture was then in the hands of various dealers (see p. 48). When in Henry Vaughan’s collection, etched (i) by De Baines, from a Goupil photograph supplied by Vaughan; (ii) by E.P. Brandard for The Portfolio, XVIII, 1887.

Copies

Numerous, after the painting entered the NG in 1886. Anon. copies include a curious variant sold Sotheby’s 27 June 1956 (121), in which the hay wain proceeds in the opposite direction, towards the spectator.

Technical Notes

Cleaned in 1942; in very good condition. The picture was lined, perhaps for the first time, in 1890, and strip‐lined in 1938. X‐radiographs show that Constable twice changed details in the central foreground. A horse and rider between the dog and the wagon, present in the full‐scale sketch (coll. V&A ) and at first retained in The Hay Wain, was painted out and partly overpainted by a barrel floating in the water; this too was painted out, but its shape is still visible to the right of and just below the level of the dog’s head. The X‐radiographs also show that there were probably two more waterfowl to the right of those below the boat near the right edge.

Discussion

Exhibited in 1821, the year after Stratford Mill (NG 6510), this is the third of the large Stour landscapes which Constable exhibited at the Royal Academy between 1819 and 1825. He had thought of varying the sequence by sending a ‘new begun’ picture of The Opening of Waterloo Bridge⁵ to the 1821 exhibition; but when (on 21 November 1820) he asked Farington’s opinion, Farington ‘recommended to him to proceed on & complete for the Exhibition a subject more corresponding with his successful picture exhibited last May’⁶ (i.e. Stratford Mill). This gave Constable five months in which to produce, in his London studio, another ‘six‐foot canvas’ based on scenes remembered from childhood. His new picture, probably begun in late November 1820, was despatched to the Royal Academy on 10 April 1821.

The view is from the path by the mill‐pond at Flatford. Flatford Mill, about a mile from Constable’s birthplace at East Bergholt, was an overshot water‐mill for the grinding of corn, leased and operated by the Constable family for nearly a century. Constable had depicted the mill and its outbuildings in other paintings, notably in Flatford Mill from the Lock, of 1812,⁷ and in Scene on a Navigable River, exhibited in 1817,⁸ the title of the latter work acknowledging his awareness that the Stour was not just a beautiful river but was (and had been since the 1740s) a commercial waterway, canalised and managed by the Stour River Navigation Company. In The Hay Wain, the mill with its adjoining house and all its appurtenances (machinery, going gears, flour mills, granary, drying kiln, dry dock for barges, chalk wharf, and coal shed⁹) is out of sight; a glimpse of its red brick wall on the extreme right is the only hint of its location. Facing the mill (on the left of the picture) is the house occupied by the farmer Willy Lott. Constable’s parents had moved from the mill‐house to a more gentlemanly residence at East Bergholt before he was born; but as Davies observes, Constable ‘may be said to have been brought up with this view’ of Willy Lott’s house.¹⁰

Past Willy Lott’s house, the stream divides round an islet (called ‘the Spong’), meandering on the left into a local rivulet, while its right channel (its surface illumined for us by glancing light) joins the mainstream of the Stour.¹¹ Our gaze is directed to an empty wagon making its way through the shallow mill‐pond towards a ford across the stream – the ‘flat ford’ which gave Flatford its name, and which was still used in Constable’s day.¹² As Parris and Fleming‐Williams note (1991, p. 204), the front wheel of the wagon is already turning in the direction of the ford, which will enable it to cross to the meadows on the right. There haymakers are at work, one sharpening his scythe, others pitchforking hay into an already laden wagon, one man stacking the load from the top (a form of team‐work too customary to be a borrowing from Stubbs’s Hay‐Makers). The season for haymaking began in June and could extend to early August.

When he began the composition of his picture late in 1820, Constable already had much material on hand for its left‐hand area. Over the years, he had made many drawings and oil sketches of Willy Lott’s house; its red roofs and chimneys, whitewashed walls and brick buttresses appear from various angles (and with some licence) in many of Constable’s Stour scenes. His earliest oil study of it was probably painted in 1802.¹³

In the more picturesque Constable literature, this fairly substantial farmhouse is usually called ‘Willy Lott’s cottage’, and interpreted as a symbol for Constable of deep rustic peace,¹⁴ the latter sentiment deriving from C.R. Leslie’s story that having been born in the house, Lott ‘passed more than eighty years without having spent more than four whole days away from it’.¹⁵ William Lott was a substantial tenant farmer (in 1824 his farm was valued at £1800).¹⁶ Constable uses the diminutive ‘Willy’, but his sisters in their reports of village news invariably refer to ‘Mr Lott’. For the Constable family as proprietors of Flatford Mill, Willy Lott’s occupancy of the opposite house was of chief use ‘to keep disagreeable people away’ from the mill and its granaries;¹⁷ but for Constable, the visibility of different aspects of this irregularly built red‐roofed whitewashed house from various stretches of the riverside was its chief charm.

When painting The Hay Wain, Constable was to refer back in particular to three small upright oil sketches of the house made in 1811. Each of these is a variation on the theme of unsensational incident in a long‐familiar place – a black and white dog is seen on the path near the house in one sketch (fig. 1), a horse on the towpath in another, while the water of the mill‐stream is high in the third¹⁸ – and between them they were to provide virtually all the ingredients for the left‐hand side of The Hay Wain, although Constable continued to paint studies of the house, such as the wider view in the oil on paper study painted in 1816 and now in Ipswich.¹⁹ In the final composition, he was to reposition the dog and the horse: but the woman stooping over the water from a step outside Lott’s house, a pitcher beside her, first seen in one of the 1811 sketches, and later in the 1816 study, was to retain the same pose and position in the finished picture. Some seven years before The Hay Wain was conceived, Constable had depicted Willy Lott’s house from a nearly similar (but not identical) viewpoint, in a darker, moodier and arguably more directly felt picture. The Mill Stream of about 1814,²⁰ in which the mill is also unseen, though its pulse is sensed in the turbulence of the backwater which fills the immediate foreground.

The ‘hay wain’ itself makes its first appearance in a small preliminary oil sketch (fig. 2).²¹ Although no feeling of breadth has yet been achieved, almost all the essentials of the finished picture are present here, as well as an idea which was quickly discarded: a barge downstream on the right, the solidity of its raised sail interrupting the wide view of the meadows. A full‐scale oil sketch (fig. 3)²² followed; painted swiftly, with large areas of the brown ground of the canvas left unpainted and with little precision of detail, it develops the composition. A horse and rider essayed in the foreground were to be retained until a late stage of the final picture, then painted over (see Technical Notes). An empty boat introduced into the full‐scale sketch is retained in the final picture. Based on a small intent study made in 1809,²³ already used in The White Horse of 1819, and to be used again in Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows of 1831, this unobtrusive boat seems to demonstrate, at least so far as its appearance in The Hay Wain is concerned, three aspects of Constable's working methods: his economy with his source materials (Parris and Fleming‐Williams’s phrase, 1991, p. 203); his sure judgement for the balance of a composition (for small though it is, the boat on the right is sufficient counterpoise to the house on the left and the hay wain in the centre); and his instinct for local detail (in this case, the build of the boat is appropriate to the shallowness of the water). The (?) fisherman making his way towards the boat will presumably set out for a stretch of the river at some remove from the mill‐pond (see fig. detail, p. 449).

The dominant motif in The Hay Wain is of course the passage of the ‘wain’ or wagon through the water. As Reynolds notes, scenes showing a cart going through a ford recur in Flemish and Dutch landscape paintings.²⁴ Constable’s sale in 1838 included two ‘Landscapes’ by Van Goyen, one with travellers in a cart, the other with wagons descending a hill; he also owned an ‘Upright landscape with water and figures’ by Siberechts,²⁵ and may have been familiar with the engraving of Siberechts’s Wagon crossing a Ford,²⁶ to which The Hay Wain comes closest in subject matter. Knowledge that Flemish painters had made such unheroic incidents the focus of their paintings is likely to have fortified Constable from the start of his own career.

Some influence from Rubens’s An Autumn Landscape with a View of Het Steen in the Early Morning (now NG 66)²⁷ is apparent in The Hay Wain, both in the breadth of its composition and in the oddly ‘Flemish’ appearance of the ‘wain’. Rubens enthusiasts tend to see a greater influence here than do Constable scholars. In the catalogue of the 1996 Rubens’s Landscapes exhibition , The Hay Wain was described as ‘a profound meditation upon – as well as a reinterpretation of – the Landscape with Het Steen’.²⁸ Certainly Constable had studied the Landscape with Het Steen over the years, and greatly admired it. He first saw it in February 1804, when he was aged 27 and the ‘great Rubens’, newly acquired by his kindly mentor Sir George Beaumont, was in restauro in the studio of Benjamin West PRA .²⁹ Later that day Constable told Farington that it was the finest work by Rubens that he had seen;³⁰ but revealingly, he went on to comment on James Ward’s almost equally large landscape St Donat’s Castle, Glamorganshire, Bulls Fighting,³¹ painted in direct emulation of the Landscape with Het Steen, and hanging with it in West’s studio. Constable remarked that Ward’s picture ‘shewed How inferior a production made up upon a picture is to one that is founded on original observation of nature’. Constable’s resolve to pursue ‘a natural painture’ predated his knowledge of the Rubens,³² and was not shaken by it.

Constable had other opportunities to see landscapes by Rubens. He is unlikely to have missed the British Institution’s Rubens, Rembrandt and Vandyke exhibition of 1815 , in which some of the greatest of all Rubens’s landscapes hung together in one room, presenting the unique chance to see together the[page 46]Landscape with Het Steen (10) and its companion, The Rainbow Landscape (8: now Wallace Collection), as well as the Duke of Buccleuch’s The Watering Place (17: now NG 4815), Marquess Camden’s Landscape with a Wagon at Sunset (18: now in the Museum Boymans‐van Beuningen, Rotterdam) and the Earl of Mulgrave’s Landscape with Moon and Stars (19: now Courtauld Gallery). In 1836, in the third of his lectures on the history of landscape painting, Constable described the Landscape with Het Steen and its ‘companion’ The Rainbow Landscape as among the finest works of ‘the magnificent Rubens’.³³ Rubens, he declared, imparted a ‘joyous and animated character’ to landscape, ‘impressing on the level monotonous scenery of Flanders all the richness which belongs to its noblest features’. He observed that Rubens ‘delighted in phenomena – rainbows upon a stormy sky, – bursts of sunshine, – moonlight, – meteors, – and impetuous torrents…’. If any of Constable’s works were to be singled out as revealing a strong Rubens influence, it should perhaps be Hampstead Heath with a Rainbow,³⁴ painted in 1836, while Constable was giving this series of lectures. What Constable chiefly responded to was Rubens’s skill in capturing ‘effects’ of nature: ‘dewy light and freshness, the departing shower, with the exhilaration of the returning sun, effects which Rubens, more than any other painter, has perfected on canvas’: if Constable emulated Rubens, it was in striving to render similar effects of nature.³⁵ There is, surely, more ‘original observation of nature’ in The Hay Wain than there is a ‘re‐interpretation’ of Rubens. Contemporaries saw the influence of Ruysdael, not Rubens. Constable’s admiration for the Landscape with Het Steen seems chiefly to have acted as a liberating force, stimulating him to introduce breadth and distance (though hardly a Rubensian ‘world view’) into his own picture of ‘a small corner of Suffolk’.³⁶

Constable himself did not call his picture The Hay Wain. That title was a nickname bestowed on it by Archdeacon Fisher when, asking about the picture’s progress in a letter to Constable of 14 February 1821, he enquired 'And how thrives the “hay wain”?’;³⁷ after that both friends several times refer to the picture as ‘the wain’. The wagon Constable depicts does not conform to the usual design of hay wagons or carts of the period: as many correspondents (particularly from Suffolk) have pointed out, its sides are too low for carting hay, and it seems better suited to carting timber.³⁸ An artist’s needs must on occasion modify accuracy. At that central point of his picture, Constable could not introduce a wagon which would bulk large, or nullify his carefully judged effect of surrounding water. By 1821 Constable had made many studies of other horses and carts;³⁹ but he had no material on hand for the sort of low wagon he had in mind. Tied to his London studio, he realised that he needed more local information. His brother Abram arranged for John Dunthorne, the East Bergholt‐born artist who sometimes assisted Constable,⁴⁰ to make ‘outlines of a scrave or harvest waggon’: in mid‐February, Dunthorne obliged, though he ‘had a very cold job’. The result appears to be much less robust than the high‐loaded wagon we see in the hayfield itself. The slatted sides of Constable’s ‘hay wain’ would enable it to carry an occasional load of hay, perhaps for a farmer lacking a cart appropriate to every purpose. From his request to Dunthorne for a sketch, Constable evidently recalled seeing something like this in Suffolk. He may also have wanted a cart similar to those in Rubens’s landscapes: if his ‘hay wain’ is unlike any contemporary English hay wagon, it is curiously close to Rubens’s chalk study of a hay‐cart for Return from the Harvest.⁴¹ The wheels of Constable’s hay wain are typical of all wagon‐ and cart‐wheels of this period. They are of wood, shod with hoops or tyres of iron; in hot weather, the wooden parts of the wheels contracted and the iron tyres came loose. The wagon’s route through the shallows to the ford is not only the nearest way to the hayfield, but will also enable the wooden rims of the wheels to soak up water and expand to grip the tyres firmly.⁴² There appear to be three horses: a pair, with a third horse harnessed in front.

Constable’s fondness for touches of red finds expression here in the thick red fringes decorating the leather collars or housen worn above the horses’ neck‐harness (the hames, to [page 47]which the harness was hooked, and whose two open ends can be seen behind each horse’s neck).⁴³ Housen had evolved as a form of protection against rain (wet harness could blister horses’ necks), and were chiefly used in winter. Coloured woollen fringes were sometimes added for decoration, but appear to have been reserved for special events, such as ploughing matches or other journeys away from the farm. On black or dark bay horses, red‐fringed housen contributed a note of brightness which evidently pleased Constable so much that he adorned the housen of horses on quite humdrum tasks with red fringes; they appear for instance on the dark bay cart‐horses beside a dunghill in The Stour Valley and Dedham Village exhibited in 1815 (see fig. 4),⁴⁴ and on those drawing a sand‐ or gravel‐cart in the small Hampstead Heath of 1821,⁴⁵ painted at about the same time as The Hay Wain. To equally bright effect, red fringes decorate the eponymous White Horse, and finally appear on the cart‐horses in Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows (a work of 1831 which increasingly seems to hint at some conflation between two places particularly dear to Constable, Salisbury and Suffolk). David Lucas noted that one of Constable’s father’s barge men ‘found fault with his puting housings on a towing horse when he had to explain to his satisfaction that the object in doing so was that he might have the oppertunity of introducing the bright red colour of the fringe as an contrasting one in opposition to the greens’.⁴⁶

In answer to Fisher’s enquiry of 14 February 1821 (‘how thrives the “hay wain”?’), Constable replied that it was ‘getting on’; but he confided: ‘Believe – my very dear Fisher – I should almost faint by the way when I am standing before my large canvasses was I not cheered and encouraged by your friendship and approbation …’⁴⁷ Abram Constable, who saw the picture in his brother’s studio towards the end of February, had ‘faint hopes’ that it would be ready for the exhibition: ‘there appear’d everything to do’.⁴⁸ Calling on Constable on 9 April, Farington ‘saw his new picture in a frame’; the following day it was despatched to the Royal Academy,⁴⁹ with its given title ‘Landscape: Noon’. Reviewers of the exhibition generally praised the picture, The Examiner declaring that it ‘approaches nearer to the actual look of rural nature than any modern landscape whatever’;⁵⁰ but it did not sell. When it returned to his studio, Constable did some further work on it, perhaps, as Reynolds suggests, improving the balance between sky and the other elements of landscape with the knowledge gained through a series of sky studies made at Hampstead in the summers of 1821–2.⁵¹

Constable was probably unaware at the time that two French visitors to England had seen his picture in the Royal Academy exhibition: the artist Géricault (then aged 30) and the writer Charles Nodier. According to Delacroix, Géricault returned to France ‘quite stunned’ by Constable’s picture,⁵² while the romantic writer Charles Nodier rhapsodised over it in his Promenade De de Dieppe aux Montagnes d’Ecosse, published within a few months of the exhibition:⁵³ singling out Constable’s picture, he suggested that French artists should similarly look to nature instead of solely to the ‘voyage de Rome’ for inspiration: La palme de l’exposition est due à un grand paysage de Constable, auquel les maîtres anciens et modernes ont peu de chefs‐d’oeuvre à opposer. De près, ce sont de larges empâtements de couleurs mal étendues qui offensent le tact à l’égal de la vue, par leur grossière inégalité. De quelques pas, c’est une campagne pittoresque, une maison rustique, une rivière basse dans les petits flots blanchissent sur les cailloux, un char de paysan qui traverse le gué. C’est de l’eau, de l’air et du ciel; c’est Ruysdael, Wouvermans, ou Constable.Scenting a coup, the Anglo‐French dealer John Arrowsmith came over from Paris when Constable re‐exhibited the picture at the British Institution the following spring (priced at 150 guineas⁵⁴), and offered him £70 for it. The figure was disappointing; but although Constable reported ‘some nibbles’ at the picture, they had come to nothing. Arrowsmith’s talk of it forming ‘part of an exhibition in Paris – to show them the nature of the English art’ – was attractive, and might bring commissions; and he was very hard up (‘painting these large pictures have much impoverished me’, for they prevented him from undertaking ‘jobs’ for money). ‘I hardly know what to do’, Constable wrote to Fisher on 13 April 1822, in a letter which discusses his dilemma (and also begs for a loan of £20 or £30).⁵⁵ For the moment he did nothing. In July 1823 Fisher told Constable that much as he himself would have liked ‘to possess your “wain”’, he could at present afford to do no more than ask for first offer of it; he thought it would be ‘of most value to your children, by continuing to hang where it is, till you join the society of Ruysdael Wilson & Claude’.⁵⁶ But when ‘the Frenchman’ returned to London in January 1824 to renew negotiations, this time proposing to exhibit the picture in the forthcoming Paris Salon and hinting that there it would be bought for the Louvre, Fisher’s advice was crisp: ‘Let your Hay Cart go to Paris by all means. … The stupid English public, which has no judgment of its own, will begin to think that there is something in you if the French make your works national property.’⁵⁷ Constable followed this advice, driving something of a bargain with ‘the Frenchman’: he agreed to sell The Hay Wain, View on the Stour near Dedham (his latest six‐footer) and a small Yarmouth Jetty to Arrowsmith for £250.⁵⁸

Arrowsmith sent these three pictures to the Salon in 1824. A full account of the sensation they caused is given by Beckett 1956. Delacroix went at least twice to see them, returning to his studio to give new life to his Massacres de Scio by adding touches of pure colour in Constable’s manner,⁵⁹ and Stendhal wrote enthusiastically about them (‘Truth for me has an immediate and irresistible charm’);⁶⁰ a more conservative critic considered that ‘the swamps of M. Constable’ were enjoying merely a fashionable success, and could detect in his work ‘hardly more than a palette brilliantly set out’.⁶¹ Constable commented almost bemusedly: ‘Think of the lovely valleys mid the peacefull farm houses of Suffolk, forming a scene of exhibition to amuse the gay & frivolous Parisians.’⁶²

The Louvre did not buy The Hay Wain (perhaps because Arrowsmith insisted in 1824 that the three pictures should be sold together for £500); but its Director (M. le Comte de Forbin) publicly expressed his high admiration of it, while Frédéric Villot, its Keeper of Paintings, was to write that French landscape painting had hitherto awaited its messiah: ‘Il se manifesta enfin, aux yeux des artistes étonnés, par des oeuvres exposées au Salon de 1824, et ce messie se nommait Constable.’⁶³ The Salon exhibition prompted some commissions; but Arrowsmith’s precarious finances (and the bankruptcy of his fellow‐dealer Claude Schroth, also involved in negotiations with Constable) appear to have doomed The Hay Wain to be shuffled ingloriously around the Parisian art market for the next few years, and probably prevented S.W. Reynolds from carrying out his proposal to engrave it.⁶⁴ Recognition from abroad was a comparatively empty honour, when what Constable really wanted (but did not attain until 1829, and then only by one vote) was election as a full Royal Academician. Charles X, King of France, had 99 gold medals to award among the 2,180 exhibits at the Salon of 1824; one of them went to Constable, chiefly for The Hay Wain (fig. 5). He could not be persuaded to go over to collect it.⁶⁵

Notes

References here are chiefly to Reynolds’s catalogues raisonnés, 1984, 1996. It should be noted that Parris and Fleming‐Williams’s grouping of illustrations and commentaries on various material relating to The Hay Wain (1991, pp. 133–43, plates 58–66; pp. 201–5, plates 100–1) also greatly assists its study.

The compiler is indebted to John S. Creasey, The Rural History Centre, The University, Reading, for discussing and providing information on the ‘wain’ and its wheels.