In this luminous landscape, Diana Neale captures the revolutionary spirit of John Constable's plein air sketches. Her work, 'It Was A Glorious Day', where 'painting is but another word for feeling', resonates with the golden light that elevates the humblest countryside into something transcendent. The magnificent aureate sky in Neale's painting recalls Constable's most spontaneous oil studies A Hayfield near East Bergholt at Sunset (1812) or his Hampstead cloud studies. Neale recognises that landscape painting's highest aim is to preserve the unrepeatable: the precise quality of light that makes an ordinary afternoon unforgettable. Her fluid paint handling echoes Constable's broken brushstrokes and scumbled passages, techniques that astonished contemporaries with their 'sparkling light enveloping the entire landscape.'

The horizontal format and intimate scale mirror the grand master’s practice of working rapidly outdoors 'on sheets of paper or scraps of canvas pinned to the lid of his paint box.' At the same time, the golden tonality captures the characteristic humidity of English air. This is landscape painting as pure sensation. Neale's title becomes both observation and prayer: in the face of such light, such fluidity, such poetry made manifest in pigment, what day would not be glorious?