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#European landscape paintings series#

Moreover, while the painting focuses on rural labor, in contrast to the work of the Realists - the French painters Gustave Courbet and Jean-François Millet, for example - Constable's emphasis is less on the figure in the hay-wain than on the natural scene enveloping him, indicating one of the key distinctions between the closely associated movements of Realism and Naturalism.

#European landscape paintings series#

The scene was therefore one familiar from childhood Constable would later state that "I associate 'my careless boyhood' with all that lies on the banks of the Stour those scenes made me a painter." Constable would not, however, have painted en plein air - as became the fashion for Naturalist painters - returning to his studio in London to complete this work based on a series of preparatory on-site sketches. It was the landscape of his birth - to a wealthy family of agricultural merchants in 1776 - and, like various other Constable paintings, The Hay Wain depicts an area of land, Flatford Mill, owned by his father Golding Constable. The landscape is that of East Bergholt in Suffolk, part of an area of south-east England, straddling Suffolk and Essex, now referred to as 'Constable country', in recognition of the artist's rich body of work produced in response to it. The horses seem to have paused mid-crossing, as if to better present the scene to the viewer, and as the eye glosses the painting it is drawn inward by the soft curves of the river-banks, invited to linger over various details: the dappled reflections in the water, the foliage of the trees, and the sunlit depths of the field beyond, where a group of haymakers can just about be made out at work.

This quintessential early work of Naturalist landscape painting depicts a hay-wain - a type of horse-drawn cart - being led across a shallow river by an agricultural worker perched on its back.

But whereas the general effect of this new technology was to force painters into other areas of creativity than the lifelike representation which the camera could achieve in minutes, Naturalist painters took on the new medium on its own terms, creating works of hypnotically lifelike effect which were unparalleled in art history.

The development of Naturalism, like the evolution of modern art in general, was profoundly impacted by the development of photography.

This was one of the ways in which Naturalist painters helped to democratize art, making its subjects comprehensible and familiar to a larger viewership. From the Norwich School of painters based in rural east England to the Peredvizhniki group whose touring exhibitions took them all over Russia, Naturalist artists tethered their aesthetics to particular locations: often rurally located, and always ones with which the artists were deeply and intimately familiar.

Naturalism was one of the first movements in modern art to give expression to nationalist and regionalist sentiments.

In this sense, the unique achievement of Naturalism was perhaps to fuse the ideology of Realism with the techniques and effects of Romantic landscape painting. Naturalism is often equated with Realism, but it was only defined some decades later - experiencing its heyday during the 1870-80s - and was more concerned than the older movement with a hyperreal visual compositional precision and with integrating the human figure into an enveloping landscape or scenario.

Naturalism partly inherited the legacy of Realism, a school of French painting which rose to prominence in the mid-19 th century, whose exponents, such as Gustave Courbet, focused on scenes of everyday working life.