By Catherine Chuter

John Constable’s The Hay Wain (1821) and William Wordsworth's “Lines Composied a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” (1798) both offer approaches to the Romantic tradition of engaging with nature. While Constable’s painting and Wordsworth’s poem develop from a shared commitment of ordinary experiences as a gateway to the sublime, they differ in method. Constable begins with an investigation of natural forms, and Wordsworth's poem leans on picturesque conventions and rhetorical reflection. Both works bypass political commentary, focusing instead on personal and aesthetic responses to nature. These differences and similarities prefigure John Ruskin’s more critical, rhetorical perspective in Modern Painters.

Constable’s The Hay Wain depicts a rural scene full of tranquility that shows ordinary people doing ordinary things. The painting illustrates a hay cart crossing a stream in idyllic countryside, surrounded by greenery and the cloud-filled sky. His observation of nature reflects his dedication to the truth of representation as the feelings evoked from the painting give importance to the seemingly ordinary situation. With the workers in the distance, a wagon making its way downstream to them, and the dog looking at the hay wain, Constable creates an authentic landscape. Unlike the Neoclassical traditions of idealized landscapes, his work is grounded in these specifics of the English countryside to celebrate its beauty. The painting has color values raised from the 18th century with its vibrant greens and reds, and the experienced brushstrokes create a sense of movement, inspiring the sensory experience of being within the landscape. The play of light and shadow, the movement in the sky, and the quiet presence of humans within the landscape suggest a harmony between nature and humanity, indicating awe without overstating the scene’s grandeur.

In the first stanza of Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798,” the narrator reflects on the five years it has been since his last visit, meditating on the beauty of the countryside landscape and toward the sublime. The poem opens with picturesque imagery as he describes “these hedgerows, hardly hedge-rows,” “plots of cottage-ground,” and “wreathes of smoke / Sent up, in silence, from among the trees,” which uses vivid imagery to evoke both the sensory and emotional resonance of the scene. While this stanza of the poem is not as rooted in close, detailed observations as Constable’s painting, it similarly draws from ordinary experiences to achieve a transformation. The poem’s emphasis on memory and the link with nature is reminiscent of the timeless quality of Constable’s The Hay Wain as it depicts an everyday scene. Both works invite the viewer or reader to reflect on the relationship between humans and the natural world, presenting nature as a source of reflection and grounding, and Wordsworth’s focus on sensory experience parallels Constable’s visual detail.

The Hay Wain aligns with Ruskin’s call for “truth to nature” in Modern Painters, in which he rejects the artificial depiction of nature. Instead, Ruskin praises artists that capture the dynamic qualities of nature, as the way Constable does with the shifting clouds and playing with the light in the reflection of water. Although the painting’s aversion to political readings, would not align with Ruskin as he believed in the ethical obligation of societal commentary, and while “Tintern Abbey” is not as grounded in close observation of nature, being more picturesque, it can reflect the second volume of Modern Painters where Ruskin expanded on the role of the artistic imagination. In that volume, Ruskin is influenced by his journey to Italy and explores how the artist’s imagination transforms observations into a spiritual truth. Both Ruskin and Wordsworth, in this sense, suggest that nature is a source of emotional renewal. Wordsworth, like Constable, also does not reflect Ruskin’s shift from thinking about Romantic notions of art as a vehicle for individual imagination and emotion toward a more socially responsible art grounded in realism and accurate portrayal of contemporary life.