Constable Country
John Constable painted the few miles of the Stour valley where he grew up for most of his life, and the area on the Suffolk and Essex border is still called Constable Country.
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About the series
He was born in East Bergholt in 1776, the son of a corn merchant who owned the mills at Flatford and Dedham. The locks, barges, mill ponds and water meadows of the river Stour were the working world of his childhood. He later wrote to a friend that those scenes made him a painter.
Between 1819 and 1825 he showed six large Stour landscapes at the Royal Academy in London, the canvases now called the six-footers: The White Horse, Stratford Mill, The Hay Wain, A View on the Stour near Dedham, The Lock and The Leaping Horse. The Hay Wain, a cart crossing the shallow mill stream beside Willy Lott's cottage at Flatford, is in the National Gallery in London. It won a gold medal at the Paris Salon of 1824 and impressed the young French painters who saw it there. The Cornfield is in the National Gallery too.
These are green, cloudy English summers, painted from oil sketches made outdoors. The wide six-footers suit a long wall. The smaller Dedham and East Bergholt views fit almost anywhere.
