Stoke-by-Nayland

This is a large landscape painting in oil paint on canvas, about one metre wide and a half again as tall as it is high, and it shows the English countryside just after rain. The picture is split into two moods. On the left, a bright, airy view opens toward a small village, called a hamlet. On the right, a shady country lane runs away like a green tunnel. In the foreground you can see a stream and puddles. A tree in the middle of the picture bends under the weight of water.

Look first at the surface of the paint. Constable flecked small touches of white across the scene, and they make the leaves and grass seem to glitter with wetness. Find the stream and puddles at the bottom of the picture, where water is easiest to spot. Then look at the tree in the centre, which droops as if heavy with rain. Finally, move closer to the paint itself. It looks rough and scraped in places, because he used a flat blade called a palette knife as well as brushes.

John Constable painted this in 1836. He had lived in London for many years, but he kept painting the countryside he loved as a boy. Stoke-by-Nayland is a few miles from his native village of East Bergholt in Suffolk. In a letter he described the exact moment he wanted: a July or August morning, at eight or nine o'clock, after a slight shower in the night. This canvas was meant as a full-scale sketch for a finished work, but he never made that later picture.

Because it is unfinished by public standards, the painting shows how much Constable enjoyed scribbling and scraping a scene into being. What it lacks in fine detail, it gains in atmosphere. The rough paint echoes the textures of real land, and the way natural and built things sit together here, trees, lane and houses, reflects his picture of a harmonious rural England. Look once more at the bright left side and the dark lane on the right, and notice how the glittering white touches pull your eye between them.