ストラトフォード・ミル

This was Constable's second try at something new for him, a landscape blown up to six feet wide, the size the Royal Academy usually kept for grand history paintings rather than a working watermill on a Suffolk river. He wanted his own country, the mills and locks of the river Stour where he had grown up, to be taken as seriously as any battle scene. He hung it at the Academy in 1820. The reviews were kind, but no buyer came forward. Years later people began calling it The Young Waltonians, after the boys fishing on the bank, a nod to Izaak Walton's old book on angling. The nearest boy, his rod bent, is watched by a smaller child holding the catch.