Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and John Constable were among the most significant landscape painters of the 19th century and influenced avant-garde movements in French landscape painting from the Barbizon School to Impressionism. This display celebrates the return of Avignon from the West by Corot, which is one of the paintings from the Sir Hugh Lane Bequest shared with the National Gallery, London.

All the featured paintings and drawing were included in Hugh Lane’s groundbreaking 1904 exhibition, Catalogue of Pictures Presented to the City of Dublin to Form the Nucleus of a Gallery of Modern Art – Also Pictures Lent by the Executors of the Late Mr. J Staats Forbes and Others. It presented an impressive collection of paintings for the city’s new public art gallery and many supporters came out to purchase works for the new gallery, including those by Corot, Constable and their contemporaries.

This display charts Corot’s development from his early more linear compositions, with their fresh clear light and orderly constructions, to his later wooded scenes of pastoral pursuits. He immersed himself in the natural environment and in his paintings rearranged nature into a lyrical, personal perspective of the world around him. As his style evolved, his palette became more subdued and the balance between light and shade became more subtle. The resulting works are thoughtful responses to the inherent beauty and mystery in nature.

Constable was one of the greatest English landscape painters of the 19th century. He marvelled at how nature and the landscape of his beloved Suffolk were in constant change and he sought to capture the air, light and life in its seasonal rotation. He said, “No two days are alike nor even two hours, neither were there ever two leaves alike since the creation of the world”. Hugh Lane Gallery’s wonderful series of four small oil sketches, reveals Constable’s virtuoso style and vigorous brushwork celebrating the majesty and mystery of the natural world.