Dunghill Theory
And the greatest painting in the world.
LUCIAN FREUD CALLED IT the greatest painting in the world. We don’t have to agree with everything Freud said, but he had a point.
The Leaping Horse by John Constable hangs in the V&A in a room usually fairly empty of visitors. You can very often have the greatest painting in the world all to yourself.
The Leaping Horse shows just that — a horse leaping over a wooden barrier on a towpath of the river Stour. On the far bank of the river is the barge that it is towing, pausing in its journey up river.
Another barge waits alongside, perhaps with a tow horse just out of shot. Behind the first barge, through a gap in the trees are two dark silhouetted figures.
The horse is leaping on a wooden structure (known as the ‘Float Bridge’) housing a sluice, like the entrance to a dark tunnel, somehow running beneath the river. The structure itself stretches along the lower half of the painting, and appears like a stage on which the action of the painting is taking place.
These are the slimy posts and pieces of old timber that Constable so loved, ‘old timber-props, water plants, willow stumps, sedges and old nets, &c &c &c' as he wrote to his friend John Fisher while working on the painting.
They have the solidity and satisfaction of baroque architecture. Bernini would have admired them, as he would have admired the horse itself, like his equestrian statue of Louis XIV.
‘One brief moment caught from fleeting time’ is how Constable described this painting, a phrase he took from Wordsworth.
And on the face of it this is what we see — a moment captured from an ordinary day on the River Stour, men working the barges, tow horses with their distinctive red harnesses at work, cows drinking, the wind agitating the surface of the river and ruffling the silvery leaves of a pollarded willow.
And yet the longer you look, the more the sense of agitation reveals something darker, a restlessness beneath the surface of that painting, like that darkened sluice opening, the entrance to a tunnel running (quite impossibly) to the silhouetted figures on the far bank.
