Stratford Mill

John Constable

Oil on canvas

National Gallery, London

Stratford Mill depicts a scene along the River Stour in Suffolk, England, where a water-powered paper mill stands in partial shadow at the left edge of the composition while children fish along the sunlit riverbank in the foreground, a barge is moored to the far bank, and a dying willow leans over the glassy water with a distant farmhouse glimpsed beyond the trees. Born in East Bergholt, Suffolk in 1776, John Constable devoted much of his career to elevating the landscapes of his native region to the status of high art, working in a naturalistic mode that emphasized close observation of light, atmosphere, and the particularities of the English countryside. The painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1820, where it received strongly positive critical notices, and it is the second in Constable's celebrated series of large-scale 'six-footer' Stour landscapes, a group that also includes The Hay Wain. After Constable's death the work acquired the alternative title 'The Young Waltonians,' a reference to Izaak Walton's celebrated fishing treatise The Compleat Angler, owing to the prominence of the young anglers in the foreground.