IN 1821, John Constable wrote a love letter to his native landscape, the fields and meadows along the River Stour, which forms the boundary between Essex and Suffolk. It is undemonstrative country, low lying and offering little by way of drama, but he was besotted with it. ‘Painting is with me but another word for feeling,’ he wrote and it was those riverside pastures, woods, mills and locks absorbed during childhood wanderings that, he said, ‘made me a painter, and I am grateful; that is, I had often thought of pictures of them before ever I touched a pencil’. For Constable, landscape came first, painting second.
He tried other regions, too—Dorset, Hampstead Heath and Brighton beach—but in his heart he remained faithful to the Stour valley. In his letters, he returned again and again to the intensity of his feeling for Nature, best expressed through the cherished local views. ‘Landscape is my mistress,’ he declared and one who ‘unveiled her beauties to me’; he may or may not have