Maria Bicknell, Mrs John Constable

By the summer of 1816, John Constable and Maria Bicknell had been attached for seven years, and her grandfather, Dr Durand Rhudde, rector of East Bergholt in Suffolk, still opposed the match. The couple decided to marry anyway. On 10 July, in London, Constable painted this small portrait of her and wrote the date on the canvas himself, faintly, at the left above her shoulder. Then he carried it home to East Bergholt. On 28 July he wrote to Maria that he was sitting in front of it, and that it was so like her he could hardly help going up to it. He had never known, he said, the real pleasure a portrait could give. Neighbours and the local curates came to look, and he did not know whether news of it had reached the rectory where her grandfather lived. They married that October at St Martin-in-the-Fields in London, and the picture stayed with the family until 1892.