William Cook

Dedham Vale

Constable painted only three religious paintings, and when you see the one in St Mary’s Church in Dedham you realise why. The Ascension is a tricky topic, even for a master painter like John Constable, and his Jesus Christ looks distinctly awkward as he ascends into heaven — like a bloke at a toga party trying to dance to the house band. Never mind. Here in Dedham you can wander through the subtle East Anglian scenery he painted, and marvel at a nirvana that remains virtually unchanged.

The tower of St Mary’s is a familiar motif in Constable’s paintings, and it’s a thrill to walk along the River Stour and see it as he saw it. It’s a few miles along the river to Flatford, where his dad worked as a miller, and where he painted ‘The Hay Wain’. Two hundred years later, the location of this painting still looks much the same. Constable went to school in Dedham. As a boy, he used to walk along this riverbank every day.

Constable isn’t the only great artist who painted Dedham Vale. Sir Alfred Munnings also lived here, from 1919 until his death in 1959, in a handsome villa called Castle House, now an intimate museum. Munnings’s reputation has taken a battering since he died, partly on account of his traditional style, but mainly on account of a tipsy speech he gave as President of the RA, denouncing modern art as ‘damned nonsense’.

The speech was broadcast by the BBC and Munnings became a bogeyman, but his work never stopped selling and now the critics are catching up. This spring, Castle House is hosting an exhibition of his paintings of the Canadian Cavalry, returning here from Canada for the first time in a century.

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