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It was in this year that a very famous English artist, called John Constable, unveiled his painting called The Hay Wain. His painting showed a horse-drawn cart, called a hay wain, and a group of workers gathering in the hay. It was painted in a place called Flatford on the River Stour in Suffolk. Constable's painting is on the left. I live quite close to Flatford and, on the right, is a photograph I took last year. You can see things haven't changed an awful lot. Constable would have spent some time making sketches of the scene at Flatford and he then took those back to his London studio to make a full size sketch before painting the picture. I took five minutes standing there for mine. Constable was 45 when he did his painting. I was not when I took my picture.
This was an example of something called landscape painting and it became very popular around this time. You must remember that there was no such thing as a camera so painters, artists, were the only people who could show the general public how certain scenes, certain places, looked. In earlier times artists had either done portraits or painted some historical scene, often of a religious event.
If you click on the name of one of the landscape artists of that time, Constable and Turner being the most famous, you can see a selection of their paintings. Maybe one is near you and you could go out and recreate it on your camera or phone.
John Constable
JMW Turner
Peter de Wint
Copley Fielding
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