Juan Manuel Moreno
Real postcards of the time
Caravaggio's life is truly fascinating, but I have to continue and I go on in the exterior gallery of the Villahermosa palace. I enter the area reserved for the collection Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza. There, I find landscape paintings, as much urban as rural. Among the first ones, "The School of San Marcos" and "Capriccio with Colonnade in the Interior of a Palace", by Canaletto; real postcards of the time. Nearby, "The Lock" by John Constable, English landscape painter born in 1776 in East Bergholt, in the county of Suffolk. He started as a topographic designer and then studied painting at the Royal Academy of London. He is one of the few English painters of world fame.
As to "The Lock", it belongs to a collection of six paintings of great size, concretely the fifth, which John himself called the "sixfooters" for the approximate dimensions of the canvas. It differs a little from the reality of the landscape when he painted it: for example, the trees on the right side did not exist, or the lock he painted is the one he knew when he was a child, not the real one, fixed a few years before. The central character is making a huge effort to open the lock, like the rower holding the rope to retain the boat. The sky, full of storm clouds, the background, with the village church very visible. Everything in the painting is amazing.
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