National Gallery of Australia | Audio Tour | Constable

Constable painted several oil sketches of the view towardsEast Bergholt rectory, showing the fields where he walked with his beloved Maria Bicknell. He painted this lively impression of the rising sun glowing over and through the fields from an upper floor window at the back of his family home. His response to the scene is expressed through energetic brushstrokes and the use of intense reds and greens – the expanded chromatic range that Constable was using in his oil sketches at this time (Rosenthal 1983, p. 45). Constable’s description of East Bergholt appeared in the letterpress to the second edition of Lucas–Constable mezzotints, English Landscape: East Bergholt, or as its Saxon derivation implies, ‘Wooded Hill’, is thus mentioned in ‘The Beauties of England and Wales’ … It is pleasantly situated in the most cultivated part of Suffolk, on a spot which overlooks the fertile valley of the Stour, which river divides that county on the south from Essex. The beauty of the surrounding scenery, the gentle de