John Constable, English Reactionary

How did England’s most popular painter become a political lightning rod in the culture wars? Artist-critic Alexander Adams finds out.

When Just Stop Oil decided to seek out publicity, The Hay Wain was an easy target. They printed out warnings about environmental armageddon and stuck them over the painting, damaging it in the process. Little did they know that their actions were following in the footsteps of Peter Kennard. In 1980, he lampooned the siting of US Air Force nuclear warheads in rural British air bases by grafting cruise missiles onto the painting in a ham-fisted political collage.

The Hay Wain (1821) embodies the deep understanding that John Constable (1776-1837) had of the links between the peasantry and the countryside. Depicting the industry and ingenuity of individuals who benefit from nature as they harness it, this classic pastoral landscape has been highly celebrated by artists since his lifetime and praised as the ultimate embodiment of England’s “green and pleasant land.” If you are of the political Left and wish to challenge the status quo, then the nation’s most cherished painting is the perfect symbol of complacency and patriotism, degraded by mass commercialisation.

Political Battlefield

For those not closely familiar with British art criticism, it may come as a surprise that the nation’s most popular landscape painting is a political battlefield. For once, Marxist critics may in fact be correct—Constable was the reactionary he is accused of being.

The painter was born into a prosperous landowning family who earned their money from milling, selling flour, and building barges in East Bergholt, Suffolk. It's no surprise, then, that Constable’s political sympathies lay with Toryism and the opposition to the drive towards liberalism as championed by the progressive Whig party.

Marxist art historians have criticised Constable for not being politically progressive. Constable, as one historian commented, “was not insensitive; it was merely that the class to which he belonged saw it as just another implement, like a plough, and useful because it reduced the need for labour, and, consequently, wages.”

In the 2002 Tate guide to Constable, William Vaughan, a professor at Birkbeck College, University of London, berates the artist for his lack of allegiance with the peasants. Vaughan notes the civil unrest in the countryside:

“Constable’s work contains no signs of such suffering. The artist can with some justice be taken to task for failing to acknowledge the more troubled side of rural life in his own day. The labourers in his pictures, as Barrell has observed, are usually kept at a distance. There is none of the involvement with local people that one finds in the work of other great naturalists of the age.”

Fear and Loathing

In the early 1820s, agrarian unrest plagued the countryside, as rural labourers sabotaged new machinery and burned buildings in protest of the expansion of farms, increased mechanisation, and the reduction of access to common land. Art historians view Constable's move from the countryside to London during this period, accompanied by his painting of nostalgic depictions of his own childhood landscape, as indicative of reactionary tendencies. Constable felt strongly for the safety of his Suffolk family during this time, and wrote of “ricks being set alight, isolated houses being broken into, [and] the churchwarden's wife, Mrs Woodgate […] nearly deranged”; the latter's sister-in-law even going so far as to take her own life.

For many in the art-history establishment, Constable's ruling-class background renders him on the “wrong side" of history. (This will probably not leave anyone surprised, not least those familiar with the show trial that was Tate’s recent (and derogatory) exhibition on William Hogarth.) More than one author has made digs at Constable’s wife Maria for wanting to live in the comfort that she had been accustomed to as an unmarried daughter in a wealthy family. Another strike against the painter is his lack of feeling for foreign countries. When invited to France, where he was hailed as one of Europe’s leading painters, Constable declined, declaring, “I cannot speak a word of the language, and above all I love England & my own home. I would rather be a poor man here than a rich man abroad.”

John Constable foresaw the pernicious influence of public organisations directing artistic production, and his resentment was especially directed at the British Institution. Lacking discretion, Constable’s outspokenness often angered his colleagues. James Hamilton, Constable’s latest biographer, believes that left-leaning radical artists within the Royal Academy would not accept the artist, who was born to a merchant family and was likely a firm Tory, being admitted to the organisation, since membership was important for securing an artist status and income. They blocked his election, denying him access to the country’s most prestigious art exhibition. He was only elected late in life, and then only by the narrowest of margins.

Rebels and Blackguards

Constable was scathing of proto-unions agitating for political change. He was alarmed at the effect of nomadism and unionisation, which he saw as stimulating malice. As he wrote to a friend:

“[A]lmost every mechanick—whether master or man—is a rebel and blackguard—dissatisfied, in proportion to his abilities – he is only made respectable by being kept in solitude and worked for himself or by one master—whom he has always served—but directly he is congregated with his brethren his evil dispositions are fanned and ready to burst into flame—with any plan for the injury of the great—that may be ripe—this—this—remember I know these people well—having seen so many of them at my father’s…”

The destabilisation of age-old customs and fealties threatened commerce and morals. When it came to the Reform Bill of 1831, Constable was anxious. He wrote in a letter that “No Whig government ever [could] do good to this peculiar country.” 

Constable’s conservatism imbues his art with a deep feeling for the landscape, which strikes a chord with the average British viewer. That on its own is enough to draw the ire of Neo-Marxist art historians and administrators. They correctly divine opposition to change and mistrust of foreign influence as reactionary sympathy in Constable. For globalists and multiculturalists, sentimental attachments are an impediment to be severed. On those grounds alone, we should be more unashamed in our admiration for Constable and reject those in public arts administration and academia who attack him most vociferously.