Constable’s Year: An Artist in Changing Seasons with celebrated author Susan Owens

Shaped by the cycle of the natural world, acclaimed author Susan Owens takes a fresh look at the life and work of John Constable to celebrate the 250th anniversary of his birth this year.. Whether in London in May, preparing pictures for exhibition and longing for the Suffolk spring, or painting boat-builders and waiting to be married in a particularly gloomy September, Constable’s life and work were unusually shaped by the yearly cycles of weather and agriculture, as well as by the often competing demands of the art world. Raised in Suffolk and trained to manage his father's land, his rural background had an enduring impact on his painting. His was the approach of one who knew the laneways, ploughs and millponds he painted intimately, and who understood the countryside as a place of both labour and natural phenomena.

Susan is a writer, art historian and former Curator of Paintings at the Victoria and Albert Museum. She has also published The Story of Drawing: An Alternative History of Art, won the Apollo Book of the Year Award. Her other books include Imagining England’s Past; Spirit of Place: Artists, Writers and the British Landscape which was a Times and Sunday Times art book of the year; and The Ghost: A Cultural History.