Why it matters
Three horses pull a large farm wagon across the River Stour near Flatford Mill, with Willy Lott's Cottage on the far left. Regarded as Constable's most famous image and one of the greatest and most popular English paintings, it is a quintessential work of Romanticism.
Did you know?
- Constable first exhibited it as Landscape: Noon.
- It is one of his 'six-footers', large canvases painted for the Royal Academy's summer exhibitions.
- A full-scale oil sketch for it is in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
- The river forms a county border: the left bank is in Suffolk, the right bank in Essex.
Based on the Wikipedia article The Hay Wain (CC BY-SA 4.0).
