John Constable

John Constable was an English Romantic landscape painter who lived from 1776 to 1837, born in Suffolk, best known for paintings of the countryside near his home, an area later nicknamed Constable Country. His most celebrated work, The Hay Wain, painted in 1821, depicts a rural scene on the River Stour and won a gold medal when exhibited in Paris in 1824, though he remained more successful in France than in his native England during his lifetime. He worked extensively from direct observation of nature, producing detailed outdoor oil sketches, an approach that influenced the later French Barbizon painters, and was elected to the Royal Academy in 1829 only after years of resistance from that institution.