Flatford Mill (Scene on a Navigable River) painting during his lifetime, and as a result it became part of the inheritance to his daughter Isabel. In 1888, she bequeathed it on behalf of herself, her sister Maria Louise and their brother Lionel Bicknell to The Tate gallery in London, where it has been displayed ever since. Flatford Mill (Scene on a Navigable River) Flatford Mill (Scene on a Navigable River) is an oil painting by English artist John Constable, painted in 1816. It is Constable's largest exhibition canvas to be painted mainly outdoors, the first of his large "six-foot" paintings, and the first in the "Stour series"
Wivenhoe Park (painting) painting, finished in September 1816, earned the artist enough money to allow him to marry his long-time love, Mary Bicknell. They married in October 1816. Constable's art is always penetrated by longing, melancholy and a yearning for the simple, natural life, for a bucolic, pastoral idyll, to rural subjects and aspects of life in the countryside, a "golden age" when people lived together in harmony with nature, a world on its way of disappearing when he painted his landscapes thanks to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. He was aware of the issue of urban growth, of urban life's unpleasantness-