John Constable, R.A.

This drawing is likely to see Constable on the banks of the Stour River. The river has become synonymous with the great painter and it runs through ‘Constable Country’ - as it has come to be known today - that area of the Stour Valley around Dedham Vale, on the border between Suffolk and Essex, bounded on the west by the village of Neyland, and on the east by the sea.

Constable once commented 'I should paint my own places best – Painting is but another word for feeling. I associate my 'careless boyhood' to all that lies on the banks of the Stour. They made me a painter...'

1.     J. Taylor, Nineteenth-Century Theories of Art, London 1978, p. 201