Irish Mensa Lecture & Discussion: Constable's "The Cornfield": A Bicentenary Harvesting

Each month we watch a pre-recorded lecture from Gresham College and follow up with a discussion inspired by what we just learned. This month's topic is "Constable's The Cornfield: A Bicentenary Harvesting".

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ABSTRACT

Constable's painting The Cornfield celebrates its bicentenary in 2026. How has it aged? This is a landscape that has acquired iconic status – a marker of national identity – as a representation of typically English countryside. How has that Englishness been constituted in the painting? And how does The Cornfield (a view of a partly working landscape) speak to current ideas about relationships and tensions between the natural world and the human presence, especially in our age of environmental anxieties?

SPEAKER

Malcolm Andrews is Professor (Emeritus) of Victorian and Visual Studies, University of Kent. He was for 30 years the Editor of The Dickensian, the journal of the Dickens Fellowship, and a past President of the Dickens Society of America.

His special interests are in Dickens and in landscape art. Among other books on Dickens he is the author of Charles Dickens and His Performing Selves, a study of Dickens's Public Readings and the relationship he developed with his readers and listeners during that career, and Dickensian Laughter: Essays on Dickens and Humour. His latest book, A Sweet View: The Making of an English Idyll, is on the personality of English rural scenery as represented by writers and artists of the nineteenth century.

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This is a FREE virtual event, with no need to register in advance. Just click on the Zoom link when it is time to join the meeting.

Join Zoom Meeting: https://tinyurl.com/56f4hv2d
Meeting ID: 662 375 2544
Passcode: 850078

For more information, contact Mary Reilly at mary@craftcottage.ie.