Landscape with Windmill

Landscape with Windmill from 1800, at Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal, is among Constable's very earliest surviving works, painted the year he entered the Royal Academy Schools. The windmill subject immediately establishes the personal significance of his chosen imagery: his family owned both a windmill and a watermill on the Stour, and the working mills were the economic foundation of the Constable family's position in the Suffolk community. That the twenty-four-year-old painter turned immediately to a mill as his subject reflects how deeply the industrial landscape of his childhood was woven into his artistic instincts. Abbot Hall in Kendal, a converted Georgian mansion in the Lake District, holds a distinguished collection of British art including significant works by Turner — whose own artistic identity was shaped by very different influences — and this early Constable, made in the same year Turner was already exhibiting major works at the Academy, documents the very different pace at which the two painters developed. Constable's maturity came later, but when it arrived, its depth and authority were incomparable.

The early painting shows the young Constable developing his naturalistic approach, with the windmill rendered with structural accuracy against a sky that already shows his sensitivity to atmospheric light.