When he is absent, however, they are able to create a method of storytelling uniquely their own, giving them the power to overcome his influence. ...Maria's work is a furtherance of the same ...commentary on women's proper artistic role found in the works of other Romantic poetesses and authoresses such as Maria Jane Jewsbury, Anna Maria Hall, Felicia Hemans, and, most especially, Letitia Landon.
...the twentieth century recast Constable, the naturalist and Little Englander, as a prophet of European High Modernism. The segmentation of the landscape into discrete fields bound by fords, ...hedgerows and other markers, which forms the compositional structure of Constable's six-footers, is still more recent, a product of the progressive enclosure of common land begun from the 178Os and accelerated by the exigencies of war with France.8 That war, which put great pressure on the price of wheat, also prompted many Suffolk farmers to abandon dairy farming. The Constable Research Project has shed much light on the artist's materials and techniques, but the realism of the product, taken in such relative haste, must forever remain a wonder of art.14 In the September 11 image, the tree tops visible in the bottom right of the image give the impression of a gaze that has been fixed on the landscape, perhaps on some georgic scene, but that is now, at whatever prompting, scanning upward to the sky. With sea levels predicted to rise by up to a meter this century, and a radically more violent and uneven distribution of rainfall, we can expect "food shortages, decreased water supplies in key regions, and disruption to energy supplies . . . global conflict and economic malaise.
... many of the recurrent tropes, themes, and character traits Julie Codell has discovered in late-Victorian serialized biographies of artists ("Serialized")-simplicity and modesty, childlike ...attitudes, affability, independence, respectability, domesticity, and a life uneventful but for its incessant labor-are heralded by Leslie's discerning selection from the correspondence. ... Anthony Bailey's 2006 biography John Constable: A Kingdom of his Own rebalances Leslie's selection from the correspondence to draw attention to the "darkness visible in Constable's life and works," and to argue that the artist was "torn between his two ambitions ... to perfect his life and perfect his work" (xvii).
'Leaf v. International Galleries' is an English case dealing with the doctrine of innocent misrepresentation in contract law. Mr Leaf bought an oil painting of Salisbury Cathedral from International ...Galleries in 1944 for 85 pounds on the representation that it was an authentic picture by the famous English painter John Constable. When he tried to sell it five years later to Christie's auction house, he was told that it was not in fact a Constable. International Galleries stood by its claim of authenticity. The trial judge found as fact that the painting was not authentic. Lord Denning held at the Court of Appeal that Mr Leaf might well have asked for damages for breach of a warranty that the painting was a real Constable; however, he did not do so, and his request to amend the pleadings to that effect was denied. What Leaf did ask for was equitable relief under the doctrine of innocent misrepresentation by way of rescission (i.e., that he be allowed to return the painting and recover his 85 pounds). Leaf's claim was denied on the grounds that five years was too long after the transaction to rescind it.
Scholars who discuss the case wrestle with the odd fact that 85 pounds seems an extremely low price to pay for an authentic painting by John Constable, and various ways of responding to this have worked their way into the treatment of the case. However, it turns out that 85 pounds might have been a perfectly reasonable price to pay for particular Constables in 1944. This article explores how assumptions like this perfectly ordinary one about the value of a real Constable in the Leaf case can lead us astray. The 'object lesson in speculation,' which I use the Leaf case to demonstrate, is the trap that legal teachers and scholars often fall into because we do not engage in actual investigation of what happened in law school casebook cases. At the same time, however, such investigation sits uncomfortably with the role and function of cases in the common law, which uses reported appellate cases in a very specific way. This article is an investigation of this problem, approached through the lens of the Leaf case.
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