The Church Porch, East Bergholt

Constable showed this at the Royal Academy in 1810, when he was 33 and still living partly on an allowance from his father, a Suffolk miller who would rather have had him in the family business. The porch is the one at his own village church in East Bergholt, and he described the scene himself as the stillness of a summer afternoon, broken only by the voice of an old man talking to a woman and a girl sitting on one of the tombs. Educated visitors would have caught the echo of Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, a poem everybody then knew by heart. The rector of that church was Durand Rhudde, grandfather of Maria Bicknell, whom Constable had begun to court the year before. Rhudde thought a painter with no income could not keep her and threatened to cut her out of his will. They married in 1816 anyway.