Weymouth Bay from the Downs above Osmington Mills

Constable painted this stretch of the Dorset coast on his honeymoon. In October 1816, at 40, he finally married Maria Bicknell after about seven years of waiting, held up by her family, who thought a country painter beneath her. Only after both his parents died, leaving him a small income, could he afford to marry at all. The couple spent about six weeks near the village of Osmington, guests of Constable's close friend John Fisher, a clergyman, and from the downs above the shore he looked out over Weymouth Bay. He never came back to this coast. The sketches he made on those weeks he mined for years afterward, working the same bay up into later pictures. The canvas is now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, far from the Dorset hills where he stood to paint it.