Constable entered the art world fairly late in life, and he made painfully slow progress once he was in it. Born at East Bergholt, Suffolk, the son of a prosperous corn merchant, John Constable spent several years in the family business before deciding, and obtaining permission, to study painting full-time. Before he went to the Royal Academy schools in 1799 (the same year that Turner, only very slightly older, was elected as an Associate). Once in London, Constable studied Old Master landscapes in the collections of Beaumont, Beckford and the influential Academician Joseph Farington. Constable continued to study and copy the work of his predecessors for as long as he lived, constantly measuring their interpretations of the natural world against his own experience of it. In 1802 he exhibited at the Academy for the first time and also received an invitation to become a drawing master at a military establishment. This he rejected, having now set himself a more ambitious goal. Constable returned one day from Beaumont's collection 'with a deep conviction', he told Dunthorne, 'of the truth of Sir Joshua Reynolds's observation that "there is no easy way of becoming a good painter". It can only be obtained by long contemplation and incessant labour in the executive part ... I shall shortly, return to Bergholt, where I shall make some laborious studies from nature. He continued to make outdoor oil studies until the 1820-s.

His first major Suffolk landscape, 'Dedham Vale: Morning', was shown at the Academy in 1811 but passed unnoticed. His first sale to a stranger came only in 1814, when the bookseller James Carpenter gave him twenty guineas and some books for his previous year's production. To professional worries were added the frustrations of his long drawn-out engagement to Maria Bicknell, whose family opposed their marriage.

Finding only occasional buyers for his landscapes, Constable was forced to supplement the allowance he received from his parents by undertaking portrait commissions and other 'jobs'. One of his earliest and largest efforts of this kind was the group portrait of the Bridges family, painted in 1804, while his later portraiture is represented in the Tate by pictures of Dr and Mrs Andrews. Faced with more sympathetic sitters, Constable revealed considerable potential in this field, as his portrait of Maria Bicknell shows. This was painted in 1816, a few months before they married. With a new confidence (and soon to be relieved of some of his financial worries), Constable set his sights even higher. Although 'Flatford Mill', exhibited in 1817, remained on his hands, he began the first of his six-foot canvases of river subjects, 'The White Horse', showing it at the Academy in 1819.

This time his work was too large to remain unnoticed. Constable was finally elected an A.R.A. later that year, at the age of forty-three. Fisher bought both this painting and its successor, 'Stratford Mill'. The next two pictures in the series, 'The Hay Wain' and 'View on the Stour near Dedham' went to the Parisian dealer Arrowsmith in 1824 and created a lively, if short-lived, interest in France.

Although Constable never lost his affection for the scenery of the Suffolk-Essex border, he gradually extended the range of his subject matter. His visits, in particular, to Salisbury, where his friend Fisher lived and to Brighton, where he took Maria for the sake of her health, provided him with much new material. But it was Hampstead that became the main focus of his later work. The Constables first took a house there, in addition to their London home, in 1819. At Hampstead Constable became more acutely conscious of weather as a continuous phenomenon, for ever altering the appearance of the landscape: he became, indeed, more aware of the changefulness of nature as a whole. In 1821 and 1822 he undertook an intense study of the most transient of all natural phenomena, the sky, producing dozens of cloud sketches, annotating them with precise details of time, wind direction and so on. In his larger paintings of the late 1820s and 1830s placid summer scenes gave way to more unsettled conditions: a choppy sea and figures scurrying before the wind. When Maria died of tuberculosis in 1828 he felt that 'the face of the World is totally changed to me'. The following year, at the age of fifty-two, Constable was at last elected to full membership of the Royal Academy, only to be told by its President that he was 'peculiarly fortunate' to be chosen when there were History Painters on the list.

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