Stour Valley and Dedham Church

This was a wedding present. In 1814 a man named Thomas Fitzhugh commissioned Constable to paint the view from Old Hall Park, the estate of his bride's family, so that she could keep the Suffolk countryside in front of her once married life took her off to London. Constable knew this ground better than almost anyone alive. He had grown up a few miles away, the son of a mill owner, and he would paint this border of Suffolk and Essex so often that people came to call it Constable's country. Here the tower of Dedham church sits far off in the distance, and the middle ground is given over to plain farm work, the fields and dung heaps of a valley waiting to be cultivated.