Susan Owens

Published to celebrate the 250th anniversary of his birth, a fresh look at the life and work of John Constable, whose life and work were profoundly shaped by the cycle of the natural world in his native rural England. As exhilarating as a lungful of oxygen: that's how some of his contemporaries felt about John Constable’s paintings. Others, though, were baffled by his uncompromisingly fresh and realistic treatment of the natural world. Author Susan Owens follows Constable's work and life through the seasons, tracing the rhythms and resonances of the artist's year to offer a vivid, unconventional perspective on this beloved figure. 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, England, 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 labor and natural phenomena. Though today he is often considered a traditional artist, in truth John Constable (1776–­1837) was a radical in his own time. His sketchbooks and paintings reject secondhand, slipshod versions of nature, instead subjecting the land, its people, and industry to intense scrutiny; developing a new kind of painting to fit the landscape he saw with his farmer's eye and felt beneath the soles of his boots. 61 illustrations

“Five thousand years have now elapsed since the creation of the world, and still it is undecided whether or not there has even been an instance of the spirit of any person appearing after death. All argument is against it; but all belief is for it.” —Samuel Johnson Ghosts are woven into the very fabric of life. In Britain, every town, village, and great house has a spectral resident, and their enduring popularity in literature, art, folklore, and film attests to their continuing power to fascinate, terrify, and inspire. Our conceptions of ghosts—the fears they provoke, the forms they take—are connected to the conventions and beliefs of each particular era, from the marauding undead of the Middle Ages to the psychologically charged presences of our own age. The ghost is no less than the mirror of the times. Organized chronologically, this new cultural history features a dazzling range of artists and writers, including William Hogarth, William Blake, Henry Fuseli, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, Susan Hiller and Jeremy Deller; John Donne, William Shakespeare, Samuel Pepys, Daniel Defoe, Percy and Mary Shelley, Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Muriel Spark, Hilary Mantel, and Sarah Waters.