L'église et le village de Brightwell

The summer of 1815 was the summer of Waterloo. Constable was 39, unmarried, not yet a member of the Royal Academy, and at home in Suffolk, where his mother had died in May and his father was in decline. He was also taking whatever local work came his way, and this panel was one of those jobs, commissioned by a Suffolk clergyman, the Reverend Barnwell. Brightwell is a village near Ipswich, a good way east of the Stour valley that later became known as Constable Country, so it is not the country he grew up looking at. The support is a piece of wood about 23 centimetres across, small enough to hold in one hand and work on outdoors. Tate bought it in 1980, with money from the Art Fund, the Wolfson Trust and the Friends of the Tate Gallery.