Stoke-By-Nayland
John Constable
JOHN CONSTABLE, 1836. OIL ON CANVAS.
Born in a small village in Suffolk, on the east coast of England where marshy land and rivers cut through a gently ebbing, pastoral countryside, the painter John Constable never strayed far from his home. So affectionate was he to his native landscape, that even today the area around his village is known as ‘Constable Country’. Yet his ties to his home were, at least to his contemporaries understandings, detrimental to his career as they led him to reject opportunities that would move him elsewhere. History has proved Constable right for his decisions to stay close; the works he painted of verdant fields, glistening rivers, and aching trees revolutionised landscape painting with a return to composition from nature, rather than the imagination. Constable painted this view of Stoke-By-Nayland, the neighbouring village to the one he was born in, many times throughout his life. Almost always from the same angle, with the same trees in the foreground and the same church behind, a church he had painted the altarpiece for as a young man, that they serve as a biographical record of his life. It was a dedication and love for his homeland that led him to such repetition - “I should paint my own places best”, he said, “painting is but another word for feeling”.