Idyllic scenes of the timeless English countryside featuring small holding farmers with their happy families were common in British painting and prints in the late 18th and early 19th century at a time when the real countryside was undergoing devastating changes brought on by the Industrial Revolution and modern capitalism. Small farms were bought up by large investors and farmers transformed into impoverished tenant farmers or unemployed workers. The farms themselves were combined into large estates enclosed with fences and hedges. As late as the 1830s, Constable was painting a less sentimental version of this nostalgic English countryside in the years leading up to widespread starvation and rioting.
