Dedham Lock and Mill

For Constable this was not just pretty countryside. It was the family firm. The watermill in the middle distance belonged to his father, a prosperous miller on the River Stour, and as a young man Constable had worked in the family's mills himself before his father let him go off to study art. He painted the spot again and again. Here the sluice and lock gate stand open on the river, a barge waits, and beyond the trees rises the square tower of Dedham church he had known since childhood. He finished this version around 1820, working it up from an outdoor oil sketch. The clouds carry the real subject, piled and shifting over the valley. They are the weather a miller reads, and the same skies Constable said he studied more closely than anything else.