John Constable was an English landscape painter, born in East Bergholt, Suffolk, in 1776, who died in London in 1837. His best-known picture, The Hay Wain, painted in 1821, shows a hay cart standing in a shallow river beside a farm cottage. He also painted open-air studies of clouds, with nothing in them but the sky.
In a 2005 poll run by the BBC Radio 4 program Today, The Hay Wain came second among the most popular paintings in any British gallery, behind Turner's Fighting Temeraire.
When Constable first showed it in London, in 1821, nobody bought it. Three years later, Paris gave it a gold medal.
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John Constable was born on June 11, 1776, in East Bergholt, a village northeast of London. It lies on the River Stour, which separates the county of Suffolk from the county of Essex to the south.
His father, Golding Constable, was a prosperous corn merchant. He owned two corn mills on the river, Flatford Mill and Dedham Mill, a windmill, and the barges that carried the grain downstream to the sea.
John was the second son, and the business was meant for him. His older brother had an intellectual disability and could not take it over. In the end it was his younger brother Abram who ran the mills.
John wanted to paint instead. In 1799 he persuaded his father to let him try, and at twenty-three he entered the Royal Academy Schools in London as a probationer, a student on trial.
The Royal Academy was the body that trained British artists, held the yearly exhibition where their reputations were made, and chose its own members. Its full members, the Royal Academicians, governed it.
He knew early what kind of painter he wanted to be. In 1802 he turned down a post as drawing master at a military college, a salary he could have lived on, although the Academy's president, Benjamin West, reportedly warned him it would end his career.
That same year he wrote to his friend John Dunthorne: "There is room enough for a natural painter." His subject was already chosen: the fields, locks and mills of the Stour valley, now called Constable Country.
He never changed it. In 1821 he told his closest friend, the clergyman John Fisher, Archdeacon of Berkshire: "I should paint my own places best." Landscapes of that kind ranked low at the Royal Academy, which kept him waiting for full membership for most of his working life.
The wait for Maria
In East Bergholt, Constable met Maria Bicknell, and by 1809 the two were in love. Marrying her would take him seven more years…
What You'll Discover
Where The Hay Wain was really painted.
What he wrote on the back of his clouds.
What Paris did to French painting.
Why he painted a ruin after his wife died.
What he said about painting, a week before dying.