Talk

Art in Context | Ruins and Revisions: The Life of John Constable’s “Hadleigh Castle”

Free admission
About this program

Sam Bezilla will draw upon several works in the YCBA collection, including cloud studies, mezzotints, and an oil sketch, to discuss John Constable’s painting Hadleigh Castle, the Mouth of the Thames—Morning after a Stormy Night (1829).

About Sam Bezilla

Sam Bezilla ’24 is a senior English major and fourth-year YCBA Student Guide from Princeton, New Jersey. His past tours of the YCBA collection focused on nineteenth-century landscape painting and religion in Georgian-era art. He is also a student assistant in the Yale University Art Gallery's advancement office and Yale Schwarzman Center's production department. As an opera and theater artist, Sam has directed The Infinite Energy of Ada Lovelace, Hand to God, and, most recently, Hamlet. He is a past president of the Yale Dramatic Association and Y Pop-Up, Yale's premier culinary arts student organization.

Art in Context

Presented by faculty, staff, Student Guides, and Visiting Scholars, these talks focus on a particular work of art—often in the museum’s collections or special exhibitions—through an in-depth look at its style, subject matter, technique, or time period.

Top image
John Constable, Hadleigh Castle, the Mouth of the Thames—Morning after a Stormy Night, 1829, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection