The Hay Wain

The Hay Wain is an oil painting on canvas by the English landscape painter John Constable, completed and first exhibited in 1821, and held by the National Gallery, London, to which Henry Vaughan presented it in 1886.

The 130.2 × 185.4 cm canvas shows the millpond at Flatford on the River Stour, which forms the border between Suffolk and Essex, about a mile from Constable's birthplace at East Bergholt. His family operated Flatford Mill, glimpsed only as a strip of red brick at the far right; the house at left belonged to the tenant farmer Willy Lott. An empty wagon, or wain, drawn by horses, moves through the shallow water toward the ford that gave Flatford its name, heading for the meadow beyond where haymakers are at work. A woman kneels with a pitcher at the water's edge by Lott's house.

Although it looks like a scene observed outdoors, the picture was painted in Constable's London studio from sketches made over many years. It was the third of his large Stour landscapes, the so-called six-footers, shown at the Royal Academy between 1819 and 1825. He made a small oil sketch of the wagon around 1820, now at the Yale Center for British Art, and a full-size oil sketch now in the Victoria and Albert Museum; a horse and rider from that sketch were painted out of the final picture late on. The popular title came from his friend Archdeacon Fisher; Constable exhibited it as Landscape: Noon.

Reviewers praised it in 1821, but it did not sell. Géricault saw it in London and, according to Delacroix, returned to France stunned. In 1824 the dealer John Arrowsmith bought it with two other works for £250 and sent it to the Paris Salon, where it caused a sensation and won Constable a gold medal from Charles X; Stendhal remarked on the truthfulness of his pictures. In a 2005 BBC Radio 4 poll it was voted the second most popular painting in a British gallery, after Turner's Fighting Temeraire.