Malvern Hall, Warwickshire

Constable was 33 in 1809 and could not sell a landscape. What paid was portraits, and that year he went up to Warwickshire to do two of them for Henry Greswolde Lewis, a rich widower who owned Malvern Hall at Solihull and who kept finding him work for the next 20 years. While he was staying in the house he walked out across the park and painted this, which was no part of the commission. The hall sits low and small in the middle distance, behind a stretch of still water holding its reflection, under a wide grey sky. That same year his attachment to Maria Bicknell turned serious, and her family spent the next seven years trying to prevent the marriage. The picture came to the nation in 1910, in George Salting's bequest.