One of the mills on the river Stour owned by Constable’s father was at Flatford, and the buildings, waterways, and locks at the mill were to provide some of the recurrent motifs of Constable’s art. This is one of a series of on-the-spot oil sketches that he used as raw material for the larger, more finished studio-picture Flatford Mill from the Lock, shown at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1812; in the larger work the view extends further to the left to include the distinctive red-brick buildings of the mill. Malcolm Warner
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