Parham Mill, Gillingham

In the autumn of 1823 Constable stayed at Gillingham in Dorset with his closest friend, the archdeacon John Fisher, and drew the watermill on the river there several times. He thought the building wonderfully old and romantic, and its owner wanted a picture of what he called his ancestor's mill. In 1825 the mill burned down.

So the canvas was assembled from paper. He worked it up from those drawings and from a smaller version he had already painted for Fisher in 1824, now in Cambridge, and sent it to the Royal Academy in 1826. That was the exhibition where he also showed The Cornfield, the Suffolk landscape his friends bought by subscription after his death and gave to the National Gallery in London.