ABSTRACT
At 9pm on the evening of 24 February 1978, the distinguished Vienna-born art historian, Sir Ernst Gombrich began a lecture entitled 'Experiment and Experience in the Arts' with the following words:
It seems to me a pleasant fancy to imagine that no event in this world ever disappears without trace, and that even the words spoken in a particular room continue to reverberate, ever more slightly, long after their audible echoes have faded. If that were true a supersensitive instrument might still be able to pick up the resonance of words spoken in this very hall a little less than 142 years ago in what I imagine to have been a vigorous Suffolk accent, very different from mine. Tainting is a science' — you would hear the voice say — 'and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of Nature. Why, then, may not landscape painting be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments'? The artist who was thus appealing to the genius loci of this place was John Constable and the occasion of the last of four lectures he gave at the Royal
Institution in April 1836, for which the invitation is still preserved in its library.
