One of the National Gallery’s greatest paintings is coming to Bristol this week
Posted on: 06 May 2024John Constable’s masterpiece ‘The Hay Wain’ will be loaned to Bristol Museum & Art Gallery from The National Gallery and will be the centrepiece for a new exhibition.
National Treasures: Constable in Bristol ‘Truth to Nature’ runs at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery from Friday 10 May until Sunday 1 September 2024.
This year marks the 200th anniversary of the National Gallery in London and to mark the occasion they are sending 12 of their greatest paintings to galleries in the UK. Canaletto, Vermeer, Velasquez, Botticell, Turner and more will be on tour with ‘The Hay Wain’ coming to Bristol, maybe because of the city’s rich landscape art history!
Tickets for the exhibition can be found on the gallery website.
Painted in 1821 by John Constable, ‘The Hay Wain’ is an icon of British landscape art and has been widely reproduced, satirised and politicised. It depicts the rural beauty of the historic Suffolk countryside and was, in 2022, targeted by Just Stop Oil protestors.
Beginning with 'The Hay Wain', ‘Truth to Nature’ explores how the landscape has inspired artists from Constable to the present day. As well as art from the Bristol Museum & Art Gallery’s collection, it will also include Constable’s oil sketches from the Victoria & Albert Museum.
The exhibition will contextualise Constable with an early landscape from the 1600s by Jacob van Ruisdael, showing Constable’s influences with examples from the Bristol School and 19th-century French art. Expect Modernist landscapes from the 20th century, together with a conceptual land piece and abstract landscape.
This exhibition will examine how artists have seen the land as a place of refuge, but also as hostile, as well as artists’ awareness of human destruction. Alongside the exhibition there will be FREE exhibitions exploring such issues as divided lands, LGBT+ relations to nature, the barriers to movement across land and more.
National Treasures: Constable in Bristol ‘Truth to Nature’ runs at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery from Friday 10 May until Sunday 1 September 2024 with tickets available HERE.
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Stan is a born and bred Bristolian, recently graduated from studying English Literature in Sheffield. His passions are music and literature and he spends the majority of his time in venues all over the city, immersing himself in Bristol’s alternative music scene. A lifelong Bristol City fan, Stan’s Saturdays are spent watching his team both home and away.
