John Constable’s famous rural art painting landscapes retraced to the Stour Valley

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The exact spot from which John Constable painted The Stour Valley and Dedham village almost 200 years ago, one of his best loved scenes, has been traced by a researcher poring over old maps and modern hedges.

It is not just the horse drawn carts and the straw hatted agricultural labourers who have vanished: changes in field boundaries and agricultural use, new lines of hedges and more recent tree planting mean that the serpentine bends of the river and the little village itself have almost disappeared from view.

The scene is a rural idyll with a typical Constable dash of earthy realism. The beloved landscape around Constable’s birthplace at East Bergholt provided the artist with inspiration for the rest of his life.

This painting, now in a Boston museum, was commissioned as a gift to comfort the homesickness of an exile: Philadelphia Godfrey, born only a few hundred yards away, who was marrying and moving to north Wales. She would certainly have identified the occupation of the men, and remembered a characteristic country smell: they are breaking up an old dung hill which has been maturing nicely for months, before spreading it as fertiliser on the fields.

The land, like other iconic Constable landscapes on the Suffolk-Essex border, including Flatford Mill and Willy Lott’s House – seen in the background of The Hay Wain, once voted Britain’s favourite painting – is owned by the National Trust.

The spot where he made the drawings or oil sketches has been traced for most of the paintings, allowing for his trick of sometimes moving features to achieve the effect he wanted, but the high perspective bringing into view two churches, Langham and Dedham, and the Fen Bridge over the river Stour, remained a puzzle until National Trust land agent Martin Atkinson started to compare a copy of the painting with a patchwork of local maps in the Suffolk Records Office.

Atkinson soon realised that the scene changed dramatically even in the artist’s lifetime, in the decades after he painted it in 1814-15. Field boundaries shown in an 1817 enclosures map of the area changed dramatically by the time a later map was made in 1830. Some fields had disappeared completely, and new hedges at completely different angles, many now with fully grown trees, plotted the new boundaries.

He was probably painting at the edge of a road which he would later follow down the hill to continue working at Flatford Mill.

Constable’s paintings are now among the most beloved and valuable in 19th century British art, but in his lifetime he struggled for financial success and recognition, and could never have married his beloved Maria without money inherited from his corn merchant father. Millions now go on pilgrimage every year to the scenes he painted.

Maev Kennedy

 

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SourcedFrom The artist says: Thanks for reading my contemporary art blog! If you are involved in the art and culture industry in any way, and would like to syndicate content from or to this blog, or if you simply enjoy art and would like to get in touch, please leave a comment! This article has been kindly provided by: Art and design: Art | guardian.co.uk

Posted by admin   @   27 January 2010
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