The story
In August 1815 John Constable painted the two gardens behind his family's house in East Bergholt, a Suffolk village a few miles south of Ipswich. One canvas shows his father Golding's flower beds lying in evening shade, the other the vegetable plots beyond. His mother had died that March. The pair hangs side by side in Christchurch Mansion, a red-brick Tudor house in a park in the middle of Ipswich, near portraits of his mother and his brother Abram and early views of Flatford, where his father owned a water mill.
The house was built around 1550 by Edmund Withypoll, a merchant's son, on land that had belonged to the Priory of the Holy Trinity until Henry VIII closed the monasteries. Elizabeth I is said to have stayed here when she visited Ipswich in 1561. In 1894, with developers ready to pull it down, the local businessman Felix Cobbold bought the mansion and offered it to the town as a museum and art gallery, along with £20,000 for buying pictures.
Visitors walk through panelled rooms furnished in the styles of different centuries and then into the Wolsey Art Gallery, added in 1932 and named after Cardinal Wolsey, Henry VIII's chief minister, who was born in Ipswich. Between them the galleries hold the largest group of paintings by Constable and by Thomas Gainsborough, born in nearby Sudbury, anywhere outside London.
