The Worker in the Landscape: Constable, Marx, Poetry

Abstract

Since John Berger's Ways of Seeing (1972) Marxist criticism of John Constable has criticised his landscapes as ‘Tory’ mystifications of the condition of the agricultural worker. This essay challenges this Marxist approach by returning to the philosophical basis of the traditional approach to painting to which Constable subscribed: ut pictura poesis. It is argued that his relation of poetry to landscape seeks to emphasize the importance of agricultural labour to all human activity and by uniting the diurnal with the demotic enhances the status of the common worker. In this respect Marxist criticism, properly applied, should read Constable positively. By altering perception of the importance of labour Constable, like early Wordsworth, or Blake and Shelley, is a potentially revolutionary artist.