The Hay Wain

The story of The Hay Wain

A horse-drawn cart stands in a shallow river in front of a cottage, a dog watches from the bank, and above all of it a sky full of moving clouds takes up half the picture. Constable painted it in 1821 from sketches of the mill where he grew up on the Suffolk-Essex border, working it up in London over the winter. Nobody in England bought it; it went to Paris, won a gold medal, and startled the French painters who saw it. It has been in the National Gallery in London since 1886, and the cottage is still there.

This is the definition of a calm painting. The dominant colors are meadow green, the brown of the water and the cart, a warm brick-red on the cottage, and a big sky of white and gray-blue. It suits a living room, a bedroom, a dining room, or a guest room, and it belongs with English-country, farmhouse, cottage, and traditional interiors, especially with wood furniture and natural textiles. It is a wide, detailed image with a lot going on in the middle distance. The Medium at 23.2 × 16 in is the size that lets you see the dog and the figures in the far field, and the Small at 17.4 × 12 in is right above a hall table.

Turner's The Fighting Temeraire is the other great English landscape of the same generation, Millet's The Gleaners is the French farmland painting it helped make possible, and Friedrich's Wanderer above the Sea of Fog is the German Romantic sky to hang beside this English one. More from John Constable.

Printed in our studio from a public-domain photograph of the National Gallery canvas, with the greens kept true to the cleaned original.