Episode 1: Suffolk

Celebrating the 250th anniversary of John Constable’s birth, Susan Owens offers a fresh look at how his life and work were shaped by his abiding love for his native Suffolk and the annual cycle of the natural world.

Today Constable is often considered to be a traditional artist, but he was a radical in his own time. Susan Owens describes how he rejected lazy, second-hand versions of nature; instead, he subjected the land, its people and its industry to intense scrutiny, and developed a new kind of painting to reflect the landscape and weather he saw with his farmer’s eye. He knew intimately the lanes, fields and millponds around his childhood home in East Bergholt in Suffolk, and he painted and understood the countryside as a place of labour as well as natural beauty.

Enriched with quotations from Constable’s funny, tender and acerbic letters, we follow him from his youth in the late 1700s, through the great love story of his marriage, to the final months of his life in 1837.

In this first episode we explore Constable’s early life in Suffolk as the son of a prosperous miller and famer in the Stour Valley, and how his intimate connection with the landscape stayed with him as he began to navigate life in London as a young artist.

Dr Susan Owens is an expert on British landscape art, and while Curator of Paintings at the V&A she oversaw the major exhibition Constable: The Making of a Master. Her latest book, The Story of Drawing: An Alternative History, was Apollo magazine’s Book of the Year in 2024.

Reader: Susannah Harker
Abridger and producer: Jane Greenwood
Executive Producer: Sara Davies
Studio Production: Jon Calver
A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds