The fourth in a series of six talks about painter John Constable takes his work The Lock as a starting point to discuss his creative achievement as an artist.

Constable’s paintings are so familiar that we might overlook them when walking around the National Gallery, or the Tate, where many of them hang. And yet in his best works, Constable presents an often challenging philosophy of looking. This talk explores Constable’s creative achievement taking his lesser-known “six-footer” The Lock as a starting point – what happens in his painting when place becomes irrelevant? What are the limits to Constable’s world, and how does this define his freedom as an artist?

Constable’s paintings can appear arcadian, and yet were also witness to a radically changing world, socially, politically, and in the very make-up of the English landscape through changing techniques of agriculture and the national policy of land enclosure.