John Constable

In 1824, three years after The Hay Wain hung almost unnoticed at London's Royal Academy, the same painting went on show at the Paris Salon and won a gold medal awarded by King Charles X. French painters already knew Constable's name. The painter Théodore Géricault had seen the picture on a visit to London and came home praising it to friends in Paris, and once it reached the Salon, Eugène Delacroix is said to have reworked the sky in one of his own canvases after studying Constable's clouds. In England the recognition was slower. Constable was elected a full member of the Royal Academy only in 1829, at 52, by a single vote.

He earned that late honour by painting almost nothing but the same few miles of the Stour valley in Suffolk, around his family's mills at Flatford and Dedham, for most of his working life. He made small oil sketches outdoors, directly in front of the weather, capturing a particular sky or a particular hour rather than composing an ideal view, and worked these up into the large exhibition canvases back in his London studio. That habit of watching real cloud and real light, unusual for a Royal Academy painter of his day, is what the French had recognised before his own countrymen did.

Flatford Mill, the watermill his father owned and the setting of both The Hay Wain and several other Stour paintings, still stands on the river today, kept by the National Trust.