Christchurch Mansion, IpswichWhile Britain boils in a heatwave, a new exhibition built around the much-reproduced canvas reminds us of the beauty of the natural world – and what we could lose I first saw John Constable’s 1821 painting The Hay Wain as a postcard with cruise missiles brutally stacked in the wooden cart and pointing at the sky. Peter Kennard’s anti-nuke photomontage is just one of the many parodies and travesties this image of a seemingly eternal rustic Britain keeps provoking. A few months ago, a newspaper cartoon depicted a ballistic missile from Iran speeding through Constable’s painting. But when I visited Ipswich to see its Hay Wain exhibition at the start of the latest heatwave it was the climate making a scorching, ironic comment on this temperate scene.Inside this Tudor house, grey, blue and brown masses of rain-promising cloud hung above Constable’s painted Suffolk fields, dappling them with shade. But outside the grass was straw yellow and the landscape around D...