The Mill Stream

This is Flatford, on the River Stour in Suffolk, the flat mill country where Constable grew up and where his father ran the watermill. He painted the scene in 1814. The house across the water is Willy Lott's cottage, and Lott was a tenant farmer who had been born in that house and, by local account, spent nearly his whole long life there, with hardly a night passed anywhere else. The stream in the foreground is a working channel that once fed the mill, crossed by the small ferry that carried people over. Seven years later Constable returned to this same cottage, seen from a slightly different angle, for The Hay Wain.