Flatford Mill (‘Scene on a Navigable River’)

Constable was born in Suffolk to a prosperous family of millers and grew up in the countryside surrounded by all the things that we associate with a rural life, including farming and livestock, barges on the river, windmills, watermills, and haystacks. Although Constable’s father expected him to go into the family business and become a merchant, he recanted and allowed his son to enroll at the Royal Academy of Art in London. Constable regularly returned home to paint directly from the landscape in which he grew up. 

Constable rejected the stormy romance of other more fashionable British landscape painters like Turner, finding their largely uninhabited scenes alienating and sorrowful. He liked to paint the daily interaction of man with the landscape instead of banishing him from it, but then unlike Turner he was well versed in the familiarity with nature that rural life inevitably brings. Constable regarded the countryside as home, and painted it not as a brooding, unpredictable entity that defied understanding, but rather as a serene and comfortable place where people knew how to live in rhythm and balance with the natural world. 

- Sarah Mills

P.S. Here you can enjoy the best of the British landscape in art. <3