In this special conversation at the Yale Center for British Art, acclaimed British painter Sean Scully will join Martina Droth, Paul Mellon Director of the YCBA, to reflect on Constable’s work and legacy while also offering insights and reflections into his own artistic practice.

Before the talk, please join us for a special curator tour of John Constable: The Landscape Reimagined at 4 pm.

About this program:

The YCBA’s exhibition, John Constable: The Landscape Reimagined, opens September 3. It is the only major US exhibition of this seminal British landscape artist on the occasion of his 250th birthday.

Renowned painter Sean Scully moved to Hampstead in 2021—more than two hundred years after Constable moved there (in 1819). For two years Scully walked across the same expanse of Hampstead Heath that became such an important subject in Constable’s art to get to his studio each day.

In Constable, the Dublin-born Scully recognizes a kindred artistic spirit. Fostered under the same dark, wet light, theirs is a shared sense of materiality, with a color sense that is often tonal. The horizon lines of land, sea, and sky are an enduring theme for both—Constable considered sky to be “the chief organ of sentiment” in a painting—and it is through their mutual interest in nature, in particular the shadows in nature, that their work evokes emotion.

About the speaker:

Sean Scully is considered one of the greatest living abstract painters. Combining European painting tradition with the distinct character of American abstraction, his paintings are often structured around layered blocks of color arranged horizontally and vertically, achieving a balance between calm reflection and vitality.

Recent major career retrospectives include Sean Scully: The Shape of Ideas at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2021-2022), with twenty other significant museum retrospectives worldwide since then, including Sean Scully: A Romantic Geometry of Colors, at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2024), and in 2025, major shows at the Parrish Art Museum, NY; Bucerius KunstForum, Hamburg; Daegu Art Museum, South Korea, and Fundaciè Catalunya La Pedrera, Barcelona.

Scully lives and works between New York, Bavaria, and Aix-en-Provence.