Veduta sullo Stour vicino a Dedham

Constable finished this in 1822 as one of his six-footers, the large canvases he sent to the Royal Academy to make the ordinary Suffolk countryside big enough to hang beside grand history painting. The view is the River Stour near Dedham, the working river of his childhood, with a barge, a lock, and boys idling on the bank. Two years later a dealer carried it to Paris and hung it at the Salon of 1824 next to The Hay Wain. French painters had not seen English landscape done this way, all broken light and flecked greens, and it caused a stir. The young Eugene Delacroix is said to have reworked part of one of his own canvases after seeing them, and Charles X awarded Constable a gold medal. Look for the small dashes of white scattered over the water and leaves, the touches critics of the day nicknamed his snow.