James Hamilton is rightly famed for his biographies of J M W Turner and Thomas Gainsborough. John Constable presents him with a new challenge. Constable lacked Turner’s self-confidence and Gainsborough’s talent for making money. His family did not mean him to be an artist at all. They owned a milling business on the Stour in Suffolk, with a windmill, two watermills and a fleet of barges to take harvests to the Corn Exchange in London.
It was assumed that young Constable would manage this concern in due course. But he took to sketching on his countryside walks, and befriended a local character called John Dunthorne, who made musical instruments and was an amateur painter. Together they would take a couple of easels into the fields every day, set up in front of a view, and paint until the shadows changed significantly, then move on.
