John Constable

Constable painted about sixty square miles of Suffolk for most of his working life and saw no reason to go further. Mills, locks, carts in shallow water, the same stretch of the Stour again and again. He knew the working of the landscape, not just its appearance, because his father ran the mills in it.

The skies are the serious business. He made dozens of oil studies of cloud alone, dated and annotated with wind direction, treating weather as something to be understood rather than arranged. The flecks of white in the finished canvases, which critics mocked as Constable’s snow, are doing the same job.

Recognition came slowly in England and faster in France, where The Hay Wain won a gold medal at the 1824 Paris Salon and impressed Delacroix. He was elected to the Royal Academy at fifty two, late, and after the death of his wife the work turned noticeably darker and rougher.