Golding Constable's Flower Garden

Constable painted this in 1815 from an upstairs window of his father's house in East Bergholt, Suffolk, looking down over the family's flower garden. It was a hard year at home. His mother had died not long before, and his father, Golding Constable, the well-off miller who owned all this land, was ailing and would follow within a year. Most landscape painters of the day built grand, idealised views. Constable instead recorded the actual ground he grew up on, plot by plot, down to the neat rows in the kitchen garden beyond and the small figure of a worker among them. The flowers in the foreground are laid in with tiny separate touches of colour, and the light is the flat, particular light of an English afternoon over Suffolk.