O campo de trigo

Constable painted this over the winter of 1826 and meant it to be his big statement at the Royal Academy that year. The lane winding up between the trees is Fen Lane, the real path he had walked as a boy from his village of East Bergholt to school in Dedham, so this is memory as much as landscape. He himself called it The Drinking Boy, after the small figure lying flat on the bank to gulp water from the pool, a detail he lifted from an oil sketch made about 15 years earlier. On a friend's advice he painted the plants as botanically true as he could. It never sold in his lifetime, and admirers clubbed together to buy it for the nation the year he died.