View on the Stour near Dedham

View on the Stour near Dedham, now at The Huntington in California, is one of Constable's celebrated large-format Stour Valley exhibition canvases — the six-footers he submitted to the Royal Academy in the early 1820s to establish landscape as a genre of the first rank. Painted around 1822, it depicts the river below Flatford from a position he had studied in preparatory sketches, with Dedham Church visible in the distance and a barge being manoeuvred through the stream in the middle ground. The painting was shown at the Paris Salon in 1824 along with The Hay Wain and other works that generated the famous enthusiasm from Géricault, Delacroix, and other French painters who found in Constable's broken, light-struck surfaces a revelation of naturalistic technique. The French response to these Stour Valley canvases was more enthusiastic than their English reception, and Constable's gold medal from the French Academy acknowledged what his English contemporaries had been slow to grant: that a painter devoted to a modest English river valley had produced major works of European importance.

The painting demonstrates Constable's mature mastery of atmospheric landscape, with the rich greens of the river valley stretching toward Dedham Church under a magnificent sky. The vigorous brushwork and the luminous quality of the light reflected in the water create a powerful sense of outdoor atmosphere.