The Garden in Art History: Constable’s Garden

Gardens have a special place in art history, they are a constant source of inspiration to artists and have continually been explored as an aesthetic and symbolic motif by art historians.

The summer of 1815 was an unsettled one for John Constable. His mother had died in March, having been taken ill while tidying her newly planted garden at East Bergholt in Suffolk, while his elderly father was showing sad signs of decline.

So, in July and August Constable sat at upstairs windows and paid tribute to the house his parents had created by painting two remarkable views: one celebrated his father’s kitchen garden, depicting it in such detail that you can identify individual vegetables. The other focused on his late mother’s flower garden with its fashionable circular bed. He committed these beloved scenes to canvas with meticulous clarity and kept the pictures with him for the rest of his life, never trying to exhibit or sell either.

In this talk Susan Owens discusses this emotionally-charged pair, then goes on to explore Constable’s later garden subjects, from views at leafy Hampstead to the melancholy, shadow-haunted groves cultivated by his friend Sir George Beaumont.