GREAT PAINTINGS OF THE WORLD WITH ANDREW MARR

9PM, CH5 ★★★★

John Constable’s The Hay Wain (right) feels like a very traditional image now, but the way the artist created this scene of a rural idyll in 1821 was rebellious for the time. Constable favoured actually painting nature in situ, which seems like a perfectly logical idea to us – especially in the absence of photos to work from – but was seen as ‘a little bit mad’ by his contemporaries, most of whom worked from the comfort of studios. Here, Andrew Marr tells us all about that, and lays out Constable’s struggles in both life and work.