John Constable Quotes
I don't mind parting with the corn, but not with the field in which it was raised.
Leslie, Charles Robert. Memoirs of the Life of John Constable, Esq. R.A. Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1845, p. 284.
President-elect Kennedy had asked the poet to write and present a poem for the inaugural.
The line, like many in good poetry, has several levels of meaning. The most obvious is that we had explored and conquered the land, before we became a nation.
The Romans were very organized regarding land ownership. When they conquered Africa, defeating Carthage, they found no written records of land ownership, no deeds, no bills of sale. Therefore, they opened up the entire land mass of Africa for what amounted to public colonization where the land could be worked and claimed legally. Illiterate Africans had no written records, and most areas where under the control of a strongman who “owned” all of the land with no notion of private ownership of land.
The Bushmen are of the indigenous people of Botswana who have only had extended contact with the larger world recently.
Peter van der Kun. The Roman society had developed huge inequalities in the wealth of its citizens. Land was the measure of wealth as the value was produced by the farming of it. In an agrarian reform, the holdings of any one citizen was limited to 500 acres. In effect the Romans created a maximum of wealth. To the owners of the large tracts of land, this was a redistribution of wealth.
See {638124} for how this Biblical passage evolved into a concept of property ownership
John Constable RA was an English landscape painter in the Romantic tradition. Born in Suffolk, he is known principally for revolutionising the genre of landscape painting with his pictures of Dedham Vale, the area surrounding his home – now known as "Constable Country" – which he invested with an intensity of affection. "I should paint my own places best", he wrote to his friend John Fisher in 1821, "painting is but another word for feeling".
