Stoke-by-Nayland

John Constable · 1836

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

126 × 169 cm (49 5/8 × 66 1/2 in.); Framed: 170.2 × 212.1 × 16.6 cm (67 × 83 1/2 × 6 1/2 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Romanticism

Stoke-by-Nayland is one of Constable's most dramatic late landscapes, a storm-lit vision of the Suffolk countryside he loved above all others, anchored by the soaring tower of St Mary's Church rising through turbulent skies. Constable returned to this corner of the Stour Valley throughout his career, but the 1836 version — painted in his sixties — shows a painter who had moved far beyond polished finish toward something rawer and more expressive. The brushwork is loose and urgent, the clouds alive with movement, the greens and browns of the fields laid down with the confidence of an artist no longer concerned with pleasing the Academy. Where his early work sought approval, this one simply tells the truth about English weather. Constable had sketched and painted Stoke-by-Nayland dozens of times from boyhood; the view was, in a very real sense, the landscape he grew up inside. This hand-painted oil reproduction is executed on canvas with the same slow layering process Constable himself used — wet into wet for the sky, glazes built up across the foliage — so the light moves across the surface much as it does in the original, now held at the Art Institute of Chicago.