. . . 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.”
Kanlaon 