Flatford Mill by John Constable. 1816 to 1817. Flatford Mill was a watermill for grinding corn, and it belonged to the artist's father. In this landscape of his childhood, the artist developed his love of nature and his taste for what he called 'a natural painture'. David Blayney Brown.

David Blayney Brown/David Dimbleby

DBB: Beside the river there's a towpath and a boy on horseback, and I think in may ways this picture was a backward glance for Constable himself. His father died in 1816 while Constable was at work on the picture and I think it is not only a depiction of the real landscape, the real working landscape of the Stour Valley but it's also a retrospect of Constable's boyhood and upbringing in Suffolk and a kind of tribute of respect to his father. If we look on a patch of sunlit field in the middle distance on the right of the picture we can see a single figure carrying a scythe over his shoulder and of course this reminds us inevitably of father time or the grim reaper and suggests, I think, his father's death. It's fascinating to think of these things because they make us realise that Constable's natural peinture isn't just the depiction of a single place at a single moment, he tried to bring into it many impressions and it's that bring together of personal experience and the landscape that gives it this appearance of reality.

You see I've always thought that the hat that's dropped here you see is actually his father's hat and that his father's no longer in the landscape but he's just left something behind, but whenever I've tried to put that to Constable scholars 'oh no no no you don't know what you're talking about', you know. But I think a little bit of sentiment is no bad thing. We live in an unsentimental age, but this was a sentimental age and people thought about things and they read them quite differently.

DD: The interesting thing about Flatford is that they have in effect tried to recreate the landscape now so that it matches the landscape of Constable's time. You can identify quite a lot of the houses and the river that are there, but the odd thing about it that on a ordinary grey day it could be anywhere. And I suppose that's the great genius of Constable, he took a place that could be anywhere and turned into somewhere so special that for a lot of people it's the icon of English landscape painting.