Constable: A Country Rebel
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Synopsis
The wildly admired genius

John Constable is the Nation’s favourite landscape painter. From The Haywain to The White Horse his pictures of rural life seem comforting, traditional and perhaps just a bit... boring. Or, as art critic and presenter, Alastair Sooke says: ‘he screams “no sex please we’re British!”’

Constable’s gentle scenes of Suffolk countryside and rolling fields have come to represent the high point of English landscape art and his innovative methods are credited with leading directly to the birth of modern art. Despite this, Constable was virtually ignored in England during his early career and his paintings considered too bright, too realistic.

This documentary asks the question: who is John Constable? How did his style go from being heavily criticised to paving the way for the impressionist movement? Is he a revolutionary who changed the course of landscape art? Or is he the epitome of a safe pair of hands? Indeed was John Constable’s art deeply misunderstood then and now?

So why is the artist who launched a thousand dish cloths the original country rebel? This film reveals his revolutionary brush strokes, the outdoors man who pioneered ‘wild’ oil painting, who rocked the establishment with his greens, was lauded by the French but not his fellow Englishmen and who gave birth to modern Impressionism. 

Duration
1 x 60'
Definition
HD
Genre
Arts
Subgenre
Culture
Producer
Tern TV
Production Year
2014