John Bicknell solicitor to the Admiralty and the Prince Regent, became father-in-law to John Constable. His eldest daughter Maria Elizabeth Bicknell married Constable in 1816. John Bicknell John Bicknell, the elder (baptised 1746 – 1787) was an English barrister and writer. He was co-author with Thomas Day of the abolitionist poem "The Dying Negro" from 1773. Bicknell has also been credited with "Musical Travels through England", a pseudonymous satire on Charles Burney. The second son of Robert Bicknell of the Inner Temple, he was admitted to the Middle Temple in 1761. He was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn in 1769.
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-