Two hundred years ago John Constable (1776-1837) had embarked on what many see as the defining project of his career. Between 1819 and 1825 he painted six unusually large rural canvasses, pictures he referred to as his ‘Six-Footers’. Each of the views depicted scenes on the River Stour as it flowed from Cambridgeshire to Essex through Dedham Vale, an area known today as ‘Constable Country’. Here the Constable family owned property. It was also where John was born and where he most often chose to sketch and paint.
Constable, like Thomas Gainsborough before him, loved the Suffolk countryside. The two men were born 50 years, but only, a society portrait of 1750 against a verdant Suffolk landscape, remains one of the National Gallery’s most popular paintings).
