John Constable’s The Hay Wain, 1821
Two rural workers labour to get their horse-drawn wagon across a millpond to collect hay from the fields in the distance. A woman on her hands and knees does laundry in the water. In the distance, a row of agricultural workers are cutting grass to fill the hay wain. John Constablegrew up in Suffolk, and never tired of painting his childhood landscape. Yet this is not a sentimental fantasy. You can see how realistic the scenery is by visiting the still-preserved Flatford millpond and Willy Lott’s house. And the social world of the early 19th-century countryside is accurate, too. Far from concealing its harshness, Constable fills his pastoral with people doing exhausting tasks. Only the onlooking dog and the boy with a fishing rod are free.