Unlike most of his contemporary landscape painters, John Constable devoted a significant part of his career to representing the scenes of his childhood in the English countryside. He was born in the Suffolk village of East Bergholt, in the eastern part of England, situated close to the border with neighboring county Essex. Although, like most artists at this date, Constable trained in London, from 1799, at the Royal Academy Schools, he was unusual in that he returned to his family home each summer to paint the scenes around East Bergholt and nearby Flatford, where his father, Golding Constable, owned a corn mill on the River Stour. Writing to a close friend, Archdeacon John Fisher, in 1821, John Constable recollected that it was these scenes that had “made me a painter.” He told Fisher that he loved “the sound of water escaping from Mill dams . . . Willows, Old rotten Banks, slimy posts, & brickwork,” and said he associated his “‘careless boyhood’ to all that lies on the banks of the Stour.”¹

As early as 1802—and at a time when most British landscape painters were painting idealized landscapes in the manner of the Old Masters such as Claude Lorrain or Nicholas Poussin—Constable made a commitment to paint these Suffolk scenes as faithfully and naturalistically as possible. He wrote in a letter to a friend that he regretted “running after pictures and seeking the truth at second hand” (referring to his recent practice of making copies after the Old Masters). He was, he wrote, now convinced that “Nature is the fountain’s head, the source from whence all originality must spring.”² Accordingly, he decided to paint as far as possible in the open air, directly in front of the motif. This view of the River Stour is one of a number of small plein-air oil sketches of Suffolk scenes that he painted between 1809 and 1816, the latter being the year of Constable’s permanent move to London following his marriage to Maria Bicknell.  

When Constable first started painting in earnest in the open air, around 1809, he initially used millboard as a support, a type of pasteboard made by casting a mixed fiber pulp onto a mold and then “milling” it under pressure. This type of board was recommended to artists for outdoor painting, and by the early nineteenth century was available from artists’ colormen in standard sizes. As this sketch seems to have been painted by Constable on a type of millboard, it could date from as early as 1809. Stylistically, however, it looks as though it may date from a little later, perhaps around 1813–14. Constable was clearly working rapidly to capture a passing rainstorm, and the sketch is notable for its vigorous handing and powerful contrasts of sunlight and shadow. Indeed, at one stage in its history, it bore the title A Landscape: Sun and Shower. More recently, though, the sketch has been known by the alternative title A View on the Banks of the River Stour.

The River Stour rises in Cambridgeshire and flows eastward, through Suffolk, for about fifty miles until it meets the sea near Harwich in Essex. In the early years of the eighteenth century, the lower half of the river was made navigable by the construction of a series of locks, together with associated sluices, bridges, and dams. It was on the final stretch of the river that Golding Constable’s watermill at Flatford was sited. He also part-owned another mill a little further upstream at Dedham in Essex. Corn ground at the Dedham and Flatford mills was transported by barges along the canalized river to the port of Mistley for onward shipment to London. Returning barges brought coal and other cargoes upstream. Indeed, Golding Constable’s business flourished in the early years of the nineteenth century, especially between 1806 and 1815 when Napoleon’s continental blockade forced the country to depend almost entirely on its own food supplies.

It was the Flatford mill, however, rather than the one at Dedham, that lay at the heart of Golding Constable’s milling business, and where Constable himself was more often to be found sketching. Although seen from an unusual angle, the cluster of what look like mill buildings on the right of this sketch can be identified as those of Flatford mill.

Constable’s definitive representation of the mill at Flatford, a large, finished picture that he exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1817 (now in Tate Britain), shows a view looking downriver (fig. 31.1). In the foreground, a pair, or “gang,” of barges are traveling upstream against the current. They have recently made their way through Flatford lock—just visible in the distance of the painting immediately in front of the mill building—and have been disconnected from the towing-horse so they can be poled under Flatford footbridge. The footbridge is just out of the composition on the left, but one of its timbers can be seen in the foreground.

This sketch, by contrast, depicts the opposite direction, upstream. Constable’s viewpoint here is close to one of the mill buildings, probably the side of the Flatford millhouse. Immediately beyond is another red-roofed building, and on the far right-hand horizon one can just make out a building that can be identified here from its roof profile and chimneys as Bridge Cottage. Bridge Cottage appears more distinctly in the distance of other, more detailed paintings by Constable that show the view looking in this same direction (for example, Boys Fishing, 1813, Anglesey Abbey, the Fairhaven Trust, and View on the Stour near Dedham, 1822, The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens). On the left of this sketch, just behind a cluster of trees lining the other side of the river bank, one can barely perceive the tower of Dedham Church, which often appears in the distance of Constable’s paintings around this date.  

A View on the Banks of the Stour at Flatford has not, until now, been fully published. It does not, for example, appear in either of the catalogues raisonnés of Constable’s work compiled by Graham Reynolds,³ nor has the provenance for this sketch been fully established yet. It is said to have once been in the collection of the Constable family, perhaps at one stage being owned by Isabel Constable, the artist’s last surviving child. Isabel bequeathed a large part of her father’s artistic estate to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 1888, a bequest that included a large number of working sketches like this one. However, during her lifetime Isabel also gave away a number of Constable’s sketches to other members of the family and to friends, perhaps including this example. —Anne Lyles