Willy Lott's House, near Flatford Mill

Willy Lott's House, standing at the edge of the millpond at Flatford, became the most mythologized building in English art largely because of its appearance in The Hay Wain (1821), and Constable's studies of it from this earlier period show the house before it acquired that symbolic weight. Willy Lott himself — a real tenant farmer, not a figment of pastoral idealism — occupied the house for virtually his entire life, and Constable's story about him never spending more than four days away from it resonated because it embodied exactly the kind of rooted, immovable attachment to a specific place that Constable himself felt but could not sustain, pulled between Suffolk and London as his career demanded. These studies from 1810–15 show the house from varying angles and in varying conditions, with the reflective mill pond surface providing compositional complexity and the opportunity to study water as a light-reflecting surface. The V&A's holdings of multiple Flatford studies allow the serious visitor to trace how a single building was worked through in paint across more than a decade, accumulating associations rather than being exhausted by repetition.

The study renders the timber-framed house with careful descriptive detail, its whitewashed walls reflected in the mill stream. The surrounding trees are painted with rich, varied greens that frame the warm tones of the building.

This study of Willy Lott's House from about 1810-1815 is in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The building, which appears in The Hay Wain and other major works, was a subject Constable returned to throughout his career. The canvas has been stabilized and cleaned. The architectural detail and surrounding landscape are well-preserved. Willy Lott's House still stands today, largely unchanged, maintained by the National Trust.