Whilst walking around this art gallery visibly overheating in the extreme French climate, I had some slight national pride seeing an artwork by John Constable (1776-1837). Painted in 1821, this is Malvern Hall in Solihull, which is now Solihull Prep School, and there are three versions of this artwork. There’s this one, a similar one in the collections of the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts and a preliminary sketch which is at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut.

France appreciated Constable far sooner than Britain did and he sold more here in two years than he did in his entire lifetime in the UK. His work was exhibited at the Paris Salon and proved highly influential on a generation of French artists, who admired the freshness of his brushwork and his willingness to paint the landscape as he observed it rather than as convention dictated. The museum label points out that this was the first Constable painting to enter a French public collection, having been acquired in 1864.

Friends tried to get Constable to travel to France and other countries to promote his work, but he noted:

“I would rather be a poor man [in England] than a rich man abroad”.

To be fair, he largely managed to achieve that ambition. As an interesting aside, The Hay Wain spent its early years in France after being exhibited at the Paris Salon, where it caused quite a stir and helped transform Constable’s reputation on the Continent, even if his fellow countrymen were rather slower to appreciate him.

Portraits such as this are a reminder that history was not shaped only by royalty and the very wealthy. This is Jacques Hurault de Vibraye (1514–1588), one of the countless senior officials whose names have largely disappeared from popular history, despite spending a lifetime helping to run a kingdom during one of its most turbulent periods. Painted by an unknown French artist in the late sixteenth century, the portrait preserves the face of a man who was effectively a senior civil servant and, judging by the fact that he remained in royal service, was presumably rather good at it.

Hurault served the French Crown as a diplomat, councillor and senior administrator during the French Wars of Religion, when the country was repeatedly threatened by political instability and religious conflict. I imagine that most visitors to the gallery will never have heard of him, yet this painting has outlasted the political disputes, the court intrigue and probably almost every building in which he worked.

That is one of the pleasures of provincial art galleries. They can display a portrait of someone nearly nobody has heard of, painted by an artist whose identity has been lost, accompanied by a label that tells us very little about either of them. So this is effectively a blog post noting my satisfaction that an artwork has survived for more than four centuries without revealing very much at all. I rather like that it is there.