The Hay Wain was one of Constable’s vast “six-footers” painted to attract the attention of buyers and depicts a hay cart or “wain” in the River Stour next to Flatford Mill in Suffolk.

He immortalised the mill and William Lott’s house in The Hay Wain but what we don’t often notice is the extent to which this was a working landscape. There are workers in the fields in the ...