Episode 5: Winter

Available for 20 days

Celebrating the 250th anniversary of John Constable’s birth, Susan Owens offers a fresh look at how his life and work were shaped by his abiding love for his native Suffolk and the annual cycle of the natural world. Today Constable is often considered to be a traditional artist, but he was a radical in his own time. Susan Owens describes how he rejected lazy, second-hand versions of nature; instead, he subjected the land, its people and its industry to intense scrutiny, and developed a new kind of painting to reflect the landscape and weather he saw with his farmer’s eye. He knew intimately the lanes, fields and millponds around his childhood home in East Bergholt in Suffolk, and he painted and understood the countryside as a place of labour as well as natural beauty. Enriched with quotations from Constable’s funny, tender and acerbic letters, we follow him from his youth in the late 1700s, through the great love story of his marriage, to the final months of his life in 1837. In this final episode we explore Constable’s growing fascination with the landscapes of winter as, towards the end of his life, he embarks on an ambitious project to publish his works as a sumptuous volume of prints. Dr Susan Owens is an expert on British landscape art, and while Curator of Paintings at the V&A she was involved in the major exhibition Constable: The Making of a Master. Her latest book, The Story of Drawing: An Alternative History, was Apollo magazine’s Book of the Year in 2024. Reader: Susannah Harker Abridger and producer: Jane Greenwood Executive Producer: Sara Davies Studio Production: Jon Calver A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds