Young Pollards 1796 - 1806

John Constable made this drawing, Young Pollards, with graphite on paper. It’s a great example of how artists responded to changing ideas about the relationship between people and the land in England. Constable was part of a generation that saw the countryside as a source of national identity. The image creates meaning through its focus on the everyday: the trees, the path, the unglamorous landscape. We can interpret this close attention to the ordinary as a reaction against the social and political upheavals of the time, such as urbanization and industrialization. The landed gentry, a class that Constable was attempting to move into, were the consumers of this vision of the English countryside. It's a conservative view, but in its focus on direct observation, it challenged the aesthetic conventions of the art institutions of the time. To understand Constable’s work better, we can look to his letters and the writings of his contemporaries. We can reflect on the meaning of art as something that is contingent on social and institutional context.