The recent purchase by Tate Britain of Constable’s great painting, ‘Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows’ (1831) provides an opportunity to look anew at Constable’s landscape art. To what extent was Constable an urban as well as rural artist? How were his views of the natural world shaped by towns and cities as well as the countryside, including the urban culture of science as well as the rural culture of farming? This lecture explores Constables art of London, Hampstead, Brighton and Salisbury as well as his more familiar scenes of his native landscape of Suffolk.

Biography
Stephen Daniels is Professor of Cultural Geography at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of many books, articles and exhibition catalogues on the landscape arts in Britain, particularly of 18th and 19th century England. His works include Humphry Repton: Landscape Gardening and the Geography of Georgian England (Yale UP 1999), Joseph Wright (Tate 1999) and, with John Bonehill, Paul Sandby, Picturing Britain (Royal Academy 2005). He is currently writing a book on the topographer and antiquarian John Britton. He was elected to a Fellowship of the British Academy in 2010.

Booking

This event is free to attend and open to all but you must book online.

Other lectures in this Autumn Art Lecture Series 2015: The Art of Nature

• 20 October - Richard Long - Richard Long: ‘In conversation’
• 27 October - Professor Frances Spalding - ‘Look, stranger, at this island now’
• 3 November - Dr Minna Törmä - Dwelling among rivers and mountains: Landscape paintings and gardens in China
• 10 November - Ingrid Pollard - The Importance of Site-Sight
• 17 November - Professor Stephen Daniels - John Constable, the ‘natural painter’?
• 24 November - Dr Lucy Donkin - Rocks as Relics and Rarities