Of Constable and clouds

A walk in the painter’s Suffolk stronghold triggers new appreciation of his depiction of big skies

- Fiona Reynolds

JOHN CONSTABLE’S huge landscapes (the ‘six-footers’) conjure up a long-gone rural England in his portrayal of pastoral landscapes, mills and streams. He painted what he knew and loved, so much of his early work was of the River Stour, near East Bergholt and Flatford Mill (owned by his father, a successful corn merchant), where he grew up. He wasn’t at the time, however, a conventional artist. Many now see him as responsible for a revolution in landscape painting, which had fallen out of fashion, reviving interest in a fast-disappearing rural way of life as the enclosures marched through England and long-standing traditions were lost.

He painted the countryside as he saw it, capturing a level of detail and intricacy that was unusual, but not immediately popular —neither Flatford Mill (1817) nor