The first in a series of six talks about painter John Constable explores the significance of the Dedham Vale as the origin of his creative life.

Walking down Fen Lane in Dedham Vale is to retrace John Constable’s steps as a child, between his birthplace in East Bergholt, his school in Dedham, and the mills owned by his father, where he worked as a young man. It was Constable’s Arcadia, and has remained to this day remarkably untouched, so that we can still walk in the same landscapes, two hundred years later.

The Arcadia of Dedham Vale was the origin of Constable’s creative life, and gave him his central motif – not the landscape, as we will discover in the first lecture, but an important structure that measures the time and energy of Constable’s world.