L'orto di Golding Constable

In 1815 Constable painted his father's kitchen garden at East Bergholt, the Suffolk village where he had grown up. It was not an easy year at home. His mother had died the winter before, after falling ill in these very grounds, and old Golding Constable was now failing too. What his son set down is almost an inventory of the place, the neat rows of vegetables, the fields beyond, the family house sitting quietly among the trees. He made a companion view of the flower garden to hang beside it. Within a few years the father was gone and the house sold, and by 1839 these gardens had been dug up and built over.