Shorter Notices
John Constable : The Hay Wain. By Sir Kenneth Clark. (Lund Humphries. 4s. 6d.)
SIR KENNETH CLARK does two things. He explains how Constable's feeling and judgement related his free sketches to his final pictures ; and he shows precisely how the French admired Constable—how :The Hay Wain roused Gericault, Isabey, and the French writer Nodier in the year of its exhibition, and after it went to Paris in 182o, with the View on the Stour ; how it excited Stendhal and Thiers as critics, as well as Delacroix and the Barbizon school. He shows how The Hay Wain is a key European picture. Sir Kenneth Clark's ten pages are more apropos than most long books on Con- stable ; but after acknowledging that., two comments can be made: these are, that art-critical language would still be critical if it were simplified ; and that, if the " naturalness bordering on the obvious " of The Hay Wain has indeed lost some of its appeal, some of the fault lies in Constable and not all of it " in the imitations of a thousand second-rate painters." Constable was an uneasy spirit, always envious of the " calm sunshine of the heart." Possibly the obviousness—falsity even—of The Hay Wain comes from an imposi- tion oh that uneasiness, on the true Constable, of a calm which Constable only affected—witness the uneasiness of the full-sized sketch. Good plates show Th: Hay Wain, the sketches for it, and the View on the Stour ; and the overfamiliarity of The Hay Wain is broken down a bit by ten photographs of detail—detail which shows the genuine Constable under that imposition.
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