La Esclusa

John Constable grew up beside the working River Stour in Suffolk, where his father was one of the commissioners responsible for keeping its locks in order, so the scene here was ordinary childhood to him. A bargeman leans his whole weight against the gate of Dedham Lock to let a loaded barge drop to the next level of the river. Constable made this one of his large six-foot canvases, the size he usually saved for grand subjects, and gave it instead to a piece of everyday rural labour. When he showed it at the Royal Academy in 1824 it sold on the very first day. He kept returning to this same stretch of the Stour, painting the country he had known as a boy long after he had left it for London.