So green goes, sowing into the story of art the mysteries of our own fleeting appearance in the world. The murky green water that laps against the ochre edge of the River Stour in John Constable’s famous Romantic landscape The Hay Wain, delineates a boundary between the world that the artist can see in the here-and-now and one that haunts his imagination from childhood. Look closer at the weave of summer greenness at which the little dog in the foreground appears to pant, and you can barely discern the ghost of a horseman and barrel that the artist had once intended to include in the painting – a spectre that, over time, is re-sculpting itself from the verdurous summer air that Constable has mystically conjured.

Though rightly celebrated for the accuracy of his carefully observed clouds, Constable is a master too of earthy hues and terrestrial textures. The tapestry of greens he weaves in The Hay Wain is a tour de force of that colour’s ability to convey the vibrancy of nostalgia for a place that ceaselessly shifts in one’s memory between wilting loss and luminous revelation.

Hiding in plain sight

In more recent eras of artistic expression, green has continued to be an enigmatic hue that hides as much as it reveals. Paul Gauguin’s seminal symbolist painting Green Christ (1889) is a teasing tangle of the colour’s contradictory connotations. Over a stone statue of the deceased Christ in the middle distance of the painting, a lucent layer of moss has stitched itself like a second skin. The face of a Breton woman, who stands in the shadow of that sculpture, is tinged a sepulchral green, as if she were slowly turning into the life-in-death and death-in-life statue – as if a kind of chromatic continuum exists between the physical world she inhabits and a mystical one that lies beyond.