The setting for this imposing landscape is the region now known as ‘Constable country’, the area in Suffolk where the artist was raised and which occupied his interest throughout his career. The view is taken from what was then called Gun Hill, looking along the Stour Valley and the meandering river, past the church at Dedham and out towards the Stour estuary with Harwich in the distance. Constable first painted this scene in a smaller picture of 1802 at the beginning of his career. Earlier that same year he had resolved to become what he described as a ‘natural’ painter and to base his art on the close study of nature. Yet although he did make many drawings and studies outside, working directly from his surroundings, he was also inspired by the example of past art. The vertical composition that he used for his earlier study and which he reuses in this later work was inspired by a painting by Claude, Landscape with Hagar and the Angel, 1646, which was then in the possession of his friend and patron Sir George Beaumont.

As with his other large-scale paintings, Dedham Vale would have been produced in the studio, using earlier studies and drawings as source material. However, the effects of light and atmosphere in the finished painting are utterly convincing. Constable worked hard to preserve the sparkle of his outdoor sketches, using palette knives and his fingers as well as brushes to create an array of textures and vivid effects. When the painting was shown at the Royal Academy in 1828, one reviewer marvelled at the evocation of the weather; ‘A shower has apparently just passed over … a few flitting clouds throw their flickering light and shades over the country.’ From the foreground where a gypsy mother tends her child by a smoking campfire, to the villages in the distance, we can lose ourselves in countless details which are rendered accurately enough for historians to identify particular buildings, bridges and other features in the landscape. But the whole picture is pulled together by the energetic handling of paint and the bold contrasts of light and shade which add depth and grandeur to the composition.

Over the years, Constable returned to the subject of Dedham Vale many times in drawings, sketches and paintings. But our painting is his last and most ambitious rendering of a motif that evidently carried many layers of memories and associations for the artist. Shortly before Constable began work on this picture, his great friend Sir George Beaumont had died, gifting his treasured Claude of Hagar and the Angel to the newly founded National Gallery in London. By re-creating his study of Dedham Vale of 1802, Constable is not only referencing his own personal journey as a ‘natural’ painter but also paying homage to his friend and to a classical land­scape tradition that they both admired and found exemplified in Claude’s work. The fusion of observation with memory, fired with emotion and filtered through the lens of past art, results in one of Constable’s greatest pictures. We can surely agree with the painter’s own verdict when, writing to his friend Archdeacon Fisher, he described this picture as ‘perhaps my best’.

This text was originally published in 100 Masterpieces: National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2015.