How John Constable Painted “Constable Country”
John Constable’s strongest inspiration came from the scenes of his boyhood, which he said “made me a painter”
John Constable (1776–1837) is often described as the greatest painter of the English landscape, but it is truer to call him the painter of Suffolk, or rather the Stour valley — the 12 square miles around his birthplace in East Bergholt, which even in his own day became known as Constable Country. He could never bring his extraordinary gifts to bear on a landscape which held no personal meaning for him. Apart from Suffolk, only Hampstead, Salisbury and to a lesser extent Brighton stimulated the intense observation and passionate feeling which is the hallmark of his best paintings.
Constable seems to have realised where his genius lay while studying at the Royal Academy in London in 1802. He wrote to his old sketching companion John Dunthorne, the village glazier, that he was determined to come home and study nature, the source of all originality in art. His plan was to make a “pure and unaffected representation” of the scenes of his childhood. With this end in mind, he not only spent that…