Der Heuwagen

When Constable first showed this at the Royal Academy in 1821, under the plain title Landscape Noon, London barely noticed and nobody bought it. It was Paris that made it famous. Sent to the 1824 Salon, this quiet view of a Suffolk millpond startled French painters with how fresh and unfinished the light looked, and Charles X gave it a gold medal. Young artists in the city who would soon be called Romantics took note of it. The scene is a real place Constable had known since childhood, the River Stour at Flatford, where a farm wagon, the hay wain, pauses in the shallow water. The house on the left belonged to a neighbour, Willy Lott, a tenant farmer said to have been born in it and to have spent almost his whole life there without leaving for more than a few days. The cottage still stands, much as he painted it, though every tree in the picture is long gone.