National Gallery of Australia | Audio Tour | Constable

Spring was one of Constable’s favourite seasons (summer was the other), and it inspired some of his most delightful paintings. He wrote: ‘I love the exhilarating freshness of Spring’ (Beckett III, p. 103), and that spring has perhaps more than an equal claim to the painter’s ‘notice and admiration’, because of the great variety of the tints and colours of the living foliage, besides having the flowers and blossoms. The beautiful and tender hues of the young leaves and buds are rendered more lovely by being contrasted, as they now are, with the sober russet browns of the trees and hedges from which they shoot … The ploughman ‘leaning o’er the shining share’, the sower‘stalking with measured step the neighbouring fields’, are conspicuous figures in the vernal landscape; and last, though not least in interest, the birds, whose songs again cheer the labourer at his work, and complete the joyous animation of the new season (Beckett, Discourses, p. 15). In this oil sketch Constable used his paint expressively t