BIRD'S WORDS
Perhaps it was not an entirely good idea to go from COP26 one day to an art exhibition the next day and not realise that it might influence my viewing pleasure. The exhibition was Late Constable at the Royal Academy in London’s West End and I had loved the works of John Constable (1776-1837) since I discovered him when I was a ‘locked up’, aspiring boy painter. I preferred him to all other English painters so I looked forward to the RA exhibition with great expectations. I was not disappointed but found my mind wandering away to the climate crisis that had been the theme of the immense Glasgow conference.
Unlike his rival competitor and, for instance – a kind of heroic celebration of iron smelting and the new mining and engineering – had no pull for Constable, who largely stuck to subjects around his Suffolk countryside. If there is any technological innovation in Constable it is that of the earlier agricultural revolution – and not even much of that – with barges on rivers and canals. Constable is therefore not drawn to showing the enormous change that was overtaking England as mines and mills, factories and shipyards were thrown up to create the vast prosperity of the later Victorian world. The pompous empire that girdled the earth and created our globalised world.
