The White Horse

Constable was in his early 40s and still without real standing at the Royal Academy when he tried something new in 1819. He took a quiet subject from the Suffolk river he had grown up on, the Stour, and painted it at the scale usually reserved for grand history painting, nearly six feet across. This was the first of what he called his six-footers, now in the Frick Collection in New York. The scene is plain working country: a tow-horse being ferried over the river on a flat barge at Flatford, where the towpath switches banks and the animal cannot simply walk across. The Academy took notice, and later that year Constable was at last elected an Associate.