Constable's "The Cornfield": A Bicentenary Harvesting

Gresham College

January 20

Constable’s painting The Cornfield celebrates its bicentenary in 2026. How has it aged? This a landscape that has acquired iconic status – a marker of national identity -- as a representation of typically English countryside. How has that Englishness been constituted in the painting? And how does The Cornfield (a view of a partly working landscape) speak to current ideas about relationships and tensions between the natural world and the human presence, especially in our age of environmental anxieties?