Valle di Dedham

Constable painted this view down the Stour valley in 1802, when he was 26 and still working out what kind of painter he wanted to be. That year he wrote that there was room for a natural painter, someone who looked hard at real English country instead of borrowing grand foreign scenery. And yet the shape of this picture, the tall dark trees framing a bright distance, he lifted straight from a landscape he loved, Claude Lorrain's Hagar and the Angel, painted in 1646. The debt is deliberate. What he added was his own: the particular light over Dedham church in the distance, and the clouds studied from the fields he had grown up in, near the village where his father ran the mills.