Constable COUNTRY

Few artists are as synonymous with a place as John Constable. Ahead of a major Tate Britain exhibition marking 250 years since his birth, Ben Lerwill ventures to the open skies and slow waters of the idyllic Essex-Suffolk border

- Ben Lerwill

I've wandered into an oil painting. In front of me is a millpond with a cream-coloured cottage at its edge and a froth of English greenery on its banks. The scene is unmistakable. Where my mind's eye sees carthorses and a wooden wagon there's now nothing but damselflies and duckweed, but the view still has a potent familiarity.

It's John Constable's early 19th-century masterpiece The Hay Wain - the star of an uncountable number of tea towels, jigsaw puzzles and biscuit tins - and I'm standing right inside it.

Few landscape artists are as synonymous with a specific region as Constable. Many of his best-known works were painted within walking distance of Flatford Mill, the scene of The Hay Wain and one of three local mills once owned by his family on the Essex-Suffolk border. His canvases sing with open skies, mighty elms and slow waters, his colours seeming to capture a countryside stuck in time. Yet there's a dramatic undertow to these grand bucolic scenes: labourers toil, reflections ripple, clouds gather.

"He's renowned as a painter of idyllic England, but I bet the air round here would have been blue!" says Ilona, one of the volunteer guides at Flatford Mill, holding up a reprint of Constable's 1822 work View on the Stour near Dedham. It shows men hefting barges into position beyond Flatford Bridge; behind her, the same waterway and bridge are instantly recognisable. "This was hard manual work. And it was a troubled time in Britain, remember, after the loss of the American colonies and the Napoleonic blockades."