Book Self is Interested in Reading

. . .   after reading “Finding Nothing Ugly,” a review of Martin Gayford’s Constable in Love:  Love, Landscape, and the Making of a Great Painter in The Economist of 21 March 2009:

• Martin Gayford’s Constable in Love:  Love, Landscape, and the Making of a Great Painter (published in England, by Fig Tree)

Here’s a quote from the review:

Constable was extraordinarily modern in believing that nothing could be intrinsically ugly:  “old rotten planks, slimy posts, and brickwork, I love such things,” he wrote.  It was a question of association and feeling.  Mood mattered more than subject matter.  He once corrected someone who had called a painting of his “only a picture of a house,” by pointing out that it was a picture of “a summer’s morning, including a house.”