John Constable (1776-1837), one of the greatest English landscape painters, represented the naturalistic aspect of romanticism. His calm, deeply poetic response to nature approximated in painting the insights of William Wordsworth in poetry.

John Constable was born in East Bergholt, Suffolk, on June 11, 1776, the son of a well-to-do mill owner. The lush, well-watered Suffolk landscape with its rolling clouds and generally flat, but in parts undulating, terrain made a deep impression on his imagination, and no painter has referred more frequently to the scenes of his childhood as a recurrent source of inspiration. "Those scenes," he later wrote to a friend, "made me a painter," and again, "The sound of water escaping from mill-dams, etc., willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts and brickwork, I love such things."

Constable was encouraged first by a local amateur and later by his friend Sir George Beaumont, the painter and collector, who...