A hay wain — a flat-bottomed farm cart — crosses the River Stour at Flatford Mill in Suffolk, with a dog on the bank and a farmhand in the water.
The sky is enormous, the light is shifting, and nothing is quite still.
Constable had been painting the same stretch of river for years; he knew every inch of it.
When it was shown at the Paris Salon in 1824, it caused something close to a sensation.
French painters had not seen landscape handled this way — the directness, the freshness, the sense of actual weather.
Delacroix reportedly repainted sections of his own work in the days after seeing it.
Fun fact: Constable made full-sized oil sketches outdoors before completing the finished version in his studio — a highly unusual practice at the time.
The scene no longer exists as he painted it; the area around Flatford Mill has changed considerably.
The painting has become so embedded in English culture that it can be hard to see it clearly.
It repays the effort.
