It was a stunning morning back in July, one of those rare days when, by eight o’clock, the dew had already burnt off, the heat was beginning to build, and the songbirds were becoming drowsy. I was walking out of Dedham village and into the sun-soaked water meadows of the river Stour: a magical world where ancient pastures, bounded by ragged hedgerows, are framed by big skies and long, open views. There was no movement, bar the faintest shimmering of poplar leaves and the slow, heavy saunter of a few cattle grazing on the tussocks.
In the near distance, an uneven scattering of alders and cricket-bat willows marked the winding course of the river. When I reached the bank, the water was gin clear – you could see the minnows and gudgeon flitting between clumps of emerald-coloured weed on the river bed. The splash of an oar surprised a brown trout, which darted off like a torpedo, and I looked up to see a blaze of pink Lycra; a woman stroking gently along on a paddleboard. She seemed entirely incongruous in this age-old landscape. And yet, her presence was also a part of the long traditions of the river – a historic waterway used by grain traders for centuries, and which we all still have the right to navigate.
John Constable, I thought, would have enjoyed that flash of colour against the greens of the fields and trees and the deep blues of the sky. He was the reason for my visit. This was where he grew up, this landscape was the inspiration behind his art. And, like many painters, he enjoyed introducing a dash of vermilion into his compositions to create a focus for the roving eye, like the horse harnesses in The Hay Wain.
By now, I was approaching the lock, the footbridge and the clutch of red-brick and pan-tiled buildings which would have been most familiar to him. It was still early morning, but someone in a National Trust T-shirt passed me as I compared a reproduction of The Hay Wain with the contemporary scene at Flatford Mill. “We like to say that the National Gallery has a copy, but we have the original,” he quipped.
The artist would, I’m sure, have been pleased by the idea that the scene where he set up his easel by his family’s water mill has, 200 years later, changed so little. And he would have been delighted that the painting, which failed to sell when first exhibited in 1821, has become such a celebrated image of the English countryside, appropriated to the lids of so many biscuit tins and chocolate boxes. After all, while Constable was a radically inventive painter, he was also a deeply conservative thinker, who opposed the Great Reform Act of 1832. He made his landscapes – virtually all of them set under warm summer skies – during a politically turbulent period in British history, and they reflect a profound belief in the established rhythms and social order of rural life.
Going back to The Hay Wain, like virtually all landscape artists, Constable made adjustments for aesthetic purposes. Comparing the painting with the view today, you can see that he shortened the roofline of the ramshackle whitewashed house on the river bank to the left. It was known, then and now, as Willy Lott’s cottage, after its owner, a local farmer. And the hay wain – or wagon – itself was based on sketches and memories, and added when he was finishing the painting in London. Perhaps that is why no one has quite explained what it is actually doing in the river in the first place. The water at that point would have been too deep for it to cross, so maybe the driver was just steeping the wooden wheels to stop them shrinking and so shedding their iron rims.
But the painting’s original prospect across the river is still clearly recognisable. Even if the opposite bank no longer affords the same open views depicted by Constable, you can still see through the willow trees to the same sun-patched meadows which he populated with the distant figures of farm workers toiling dutifully.
Those meadows, the river and the huddle of buildings at Flatford were the subject of more than 40 of his paintings and sketches. Few places in the world give such an insight into the work of a great artist, and fewer still can still be enjoyed on a gentle stroll through the English countryside.
The Constable walk
I started the three-mile circular walk at Dedham, but the more logical way to explore Constable Country is to begin at East Bergholt, where he grew up, and then, following paths clearly signposted by the National Trust, continue on to Dedham, where he went to school, and finish up heading across the water meadows to Flatford Mill.
In East Bergholt, Constable spent his childhood in a large house built by his parents on the edge of the village. It was demolished in the 1840s, but the original grounds are marked by a plaque on some iron railings. A little way down the road are the knapped flints and fancy stonework of the nave of St Mary’s, one of those spectacular Suffolk churches built mostly in the 15th century, but whose tower was left unfinished when Henry VIII’s Reformation brought work to an abrupt halt in the 1540s. The grandfather of Constable’s wife, Maria Bicknell, had been rector here and the Constable family had their own pew.
Heading gently downhill from the church, you can follow the artist’s daily walk to his childhood grammar school in Dedham, just across the border in Essex. He would have turned right a little way down on the right, at Fen Lane, and if you do the same you will follow a path worn deep between hedgerows and trees – some of which must have been saplings in Constable’s time. Then you strike out across the water meadows – “the sweet fields where we have passed so many happy hours together” as he wrote to Maria – and along the Stour to Dedham.
The church here, which dominates one side of a main street of impressive 18th-century merchants’ houses, is an even more majestic late Gothic church than St Mary’s in East Bergholt, and its spectacular stone tower – often viewed from distance across the meadows – appears in more than two dozen of Constable’s paintings. But before you head off in search of Flatford Mill, pop inside. High on the south wall is a Constable rarity – an “Ascension of Christ”. It’s one of only three religious scenes made by him and it is exactly contemporary with The Hay Wain.
Essentials
Discover Constable & The Hay Wain is at the National Gallery (nationalgallery.org.uk) from October 17 until February 2 2025, admission free. Much of Dedham Vale is owned by the National Trust (nationaltrust.org.uk), which has a café and a visitor centre, with reproductions of the key paintings Constable made at Flatford Mill. The website includes walking directions, including from Manningtree Station – about two miles’ walk from Flatford.
The mill itself is used as a study centre by the Field Studies Council (field-studies-council.org) for low-cost residential courses on subjects related to nature and art. Some of the accommodation is in Willy Lott’s cottage.
