The Hay Wain

An empty hay wagon fords the mill stream of the River Stour beside Willy Lott's cottage, a dog watching from the bank, under a towering East Anglian sky of stacked summer cloud. Constable painted the six-foot canvas in his London studio in 1821 from oil sketches made on the Suffolk sites of his boyhood. Largely ignored at home, it won a gold medal at the 1824 Paris Salon and jolted Delacroix into reworking his own canvases. Now in the National Gallery, London, it has become the defining image of rural England.