Art › London › The National Gallery
The Hay Wain
A hay cart crossing the river Stour in Suffolk, under big summer clouds.
Constable painted the countryside he grew up in: the river Stour at Flatford Mill, where his father had a mill, with Willy Lott’s cottage on the left and an empty hay cart splashing through the shallows to the fields beyond.
Shown at the Royal Academy in 1821 as Landscape: Noon, it did not sell. In Paris three years later it won a gold medal from King Charles X, and young French painters such as Delacroix studied its fresh greens and broken touches of white. Stand before it in 3D ›
