John Constable was born in East Bergholt in 1776. The
son of a wealthy miller, he grew up working with his father and was known
as a youth as the 'handsome miller'.
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Refusing to follow in his father's footsteps, he decided to leave the
countryside for London to study art.
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Flatford Mill lay at the heart of the corn-milling business
run by Constable's father. Constable shows a pair of barges travelling
upstream. They are about to be disconnected from the towing-horse so that
they can be poled under Flatford footbridge (just out of the composition
to the left). Constable painted much of the picture on the spot in the
summer of 1816.
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Living in London, he would return to the Stour valley as a young artist
and that landscape remained a constant source of inspiration, many of
his paintings depicting the watermeadows and millstreams of his childhood.
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