The White Horse

John Constable spent his life painting the country of the Stour valley in Suffolk, where he had grown up the son of a miller, and it was late before London took notice of a landscape art built on the direct study of a particular place rather than on the classical conventions of Claude and Poussin. This canvas was the first of the large pictures he called his “six-footers”, scaled to the walls of the Royal Academy exhibition, and the work that made his name when it was shown there in 1819; he sold it in the same year, and its reception encouraged him to continue the series that would include The Hay Wain. The painting is held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington.