The second in a series of six talks about painter John Constable details how place and poetry shaped his world view into the 1820s.

Constable was steeped in the poetry of the eighteenth century, in James Thompson’s The Seasons and George Crabbe’s The Borough; he was also steeped in the poetry of Wordsworth. What Constable took from poetry was above all a sense of the importance of landscape and of the natural world. In this second lecture we look in detail at how a sense of place, a feeling for poetry, and a new approach to painting shaped Constable’s world view into the 1820s.