La Ferme de la vallée

Constable painted this in 1835, two years before he died, and he was looking backward. The house is Willy Lott's, at Flatford on the River Stour in Suffolk, the countryside where Constable grew up and returned to again and again in his work. Lott, a farmer, was said to have lived in that house for over eighty years almost without leaving it, which was exactly its appeal for the painter, a picture of a settled rural life that was already slipping away as England industrialised. Constable built the composition from earlier studies of the same spot going back twenty years. By this date he worked the surface hard, flecking it with white highlights that critics of the day complained looked like snow or whitewash.