The Vale of Dedham

Constable painted this view in 1828, the year his wife Maria died of tuberculosis, leaving him with seven children and a grief he never really shed. He returned, as he often did in hard stretches, to the valley of his boyhood on the Suffolk border, looking down from Gun Hill along the winding River Stour toward Dedham church. He had painted this stretch many times, but never so ambitiously. He laid the paint on thick, flicking in touches of white so the light seems to shimmer over the fields, and he built the whole composition as a quiet tribute to Claude Lorrain, the old master he loved. The picture helped win him full membership of the Royal Academy the next year, an honour that had taken him most of his life to reach.