John Constable is one of the most celebrated and widely studied artists of the 19th century. He was born and brought up on the Suffolk-Essex border and, until he was 22, worked in his father’s thriving milling, grain-merchant firm.

Constable’s connection with the countryside, his intimate familiarity with rural life, is evident in his paintings, drawings, and prints, in his choice of subjects and his attentive observation of the smallest detail of the natural world.

When Constable spoke and wrote on the topic of ‘ landscape’ later in life, he used many of these East-Anglian scenes in an all-encompassing way, to ‘ characterise the scenery of England’, but what did that mean? How much has the landscape changed and how recognisable are the same views today? How can walking with Constable help us understand his work, and what he was doing?

This project uses digital technologies to take prints locked in a museum back into the landscape which made them, which represents them, and of which they are part. Using an app enabling us to pinpoint and ‘see’ various Constable compositions we will curate a series of public walks in landscapes Constable sketched, documenting them to produce, as a form of public writing and as a walking diary.