12/8/2023 0 Comments Clip art multiple stacks of books![]() “You can forget our ‘green and pleasant land,’” one of the protesters, the twenty-three-year-old Hannah Hunt, proclaimed, “when further oil extraction will lead to widespread crop failures. Fossil-fuel-consuming jets festoon the sky, and smokestacks line the horizon. Over Constable’s canvas the Just Stop Oil activists taped an updated version, in which the winding river Stour, in the artist’s native Suffolk, is replaced by an asphalt highway. Constable’s much-loved masterpiece, a favorite of makers of jigsaw puzzles and chocolate boxes, would seem to embody a vision of rural peace and plenty, before the depredations of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of Big Oil. Turner’s contrastingly militant The Fighting Temeraire (1839), a tribute to a victorious ship from the 1805 Battle of Trafalgar. In a BBC poll in 2005, The Hay Wain was voted the second-most-popular painting in Britain, behind J.M.W. Storm clouds gather above the billowing trees. A spaniel walks warily along the bank while a woman draws water from the shimmering shallows. The six-foot painting depicts a horse-drawn wagon (or wain) under the guidance of a man and boy crossing a mill stream. What do John Constable’s seductive paintings-those cunningly constructed scenes of English rural life set among majestic trees and canopied by clouds-mean to us today? A possible answer was offered by a pair of environmental activists from Just Stop Oil who entered London’s National Gallery on July 4, 2022, and glued their hands to the gilt frame of Constable’s The Hay Wain (1821).
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