Four summer paintings have been chosen for the month of August, the first being John Constable’s painstaking depiction of Golding Constable’s Kitchen Garden, seen together with a view of the flat and fertile Stour Valley landscape. The artist painted the picture looking out from one of the upper windows at the back of East Bergholt House, his parents’ home in Suffolk, where he habitually spent the summer of each year.

Constable regularly needed to get away from London, where he was struggling to make his name as an artist, to pursue his studies from nature. It was common practice for landscape painters to spend the warmer months sketching and painting directly from the motif, accumulating a stock of subjects which could later be worked up in the studio. But whereas most of Constable’s contemporaries explored new territory each year, travelling all over Britain and continental Europe in search of sublime or picturesque scenery, he remained resolutely faithful to the tranquil and undramatic beauties of his native landscape. “I should paint my own places best,” he wrote to his friend, John Fisher. “Painting is but another word for feeling.”

Constable’s feelings in the summer of 1815 were mixed. The weather that year was good and his paintings seemed both more vibrant and more emotionally intense than ever before. But this time of dawning excitement and new beginnings was shadowed by death and illness. The painter’s mother, Ann, had died in the spring at the age of 66. His father, Golding Constable, who was in his late seventies, had less than a year to live, and was showing signs of increasing infirmity.

Golding Constable’s Kitchen Garden is one of a pair of pictures showing views from the back of East Bergholt House. The artist never exhibited or attempted to sell these...

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