( 1776-1837 )

     John Constable was born on 11 June 1776 in East Bergholt, Suffolk .He was a romantic British landscape painter of the nineteenth century.

The area of Dedham Vale in Suffolk is known as the "Constable country".
Flatford Mill, the subject of one of his best known works was his father, a brewer flourishing business.

He felt in love with a woman around, Maria Bicknell, and got to know his father, a relative of the king of Great Britain, which did not find enough talented Constable. After five years, he finally gave his consent to their marriage and the wedding took place in 1816. After giving birth to seven children, Maria died of tuberculosis, which shocked her husband.

The son of a wealthy miller, John Constable was born in East Bergholt, in Suffolk. Intended by his father to the ecclesiastical career, he preferred, youth, spending his time drawing. When Sir George Beaumont, the founder of the National Gallery in London, noticed his gifts, he managed to persuade his father to include it in the Royal Academy. Constable decided to leave the school to dedicate himself to landscape painting. Constable exercised in particular by copying works by Jacob van Ruysdael and Claude Lorrain, and in 1802 he exhibited his first truly personal works at the Royal Academy. While in the late eighteenth century, the landscape was still touched by the French painters such as Reynolds and Gainsborough, as décor, Constable chose to paint nature for itself.

From 1816,when his father died, he could survive on its annuities and he devoted himself entirely to his work. Fascinated by the record of the atmosphere, it privileged glare of water and the lighting of the sky, themes that he made many studies on the ground. On the back of it, he took care to note the date, time and the weather was, and the smallest changes in climate may cause a different light. In watercolor as in oil, which combines sub-layers and thick paste, he had a technical skill. Very attached to their region of origin, Suffolk, he said many of the same themes as the banks of the Stour (the Moulin de Dedham, 1820, Victoria and Albert Museum, London). It was not until 1823 that he received its first major order of the bishop of Salisbury, a view of the cathedral (Salisbury Cathedral, Victoria and Albert Museum).
In the following year he exhibited in Paris at the Salon, and won a gold medal. His work - and especially hay Charette (1821, National Gallery of London) - won the admiration of Delacroix and landscapes of the Barbizon School who began to paint outdoors.

In 1829, his appointment to the Royal Academy finally gave him the recognition he waited.

His death, in 1837, interrupted early this brief official career. His art, which emerged a particularly sensitive and fair view of the nature of light and atmosphere, had no real influence in England, but in marked contrast deeply French painters of the second half of the nineteenth century including Eugene Boudin and Claude Monet.