He sent it to the Royal Academy in 1821 under the title Landscape: Noon. The name everybody uses came from his friend Archdeacon Fisher. The wagon is the wrong shape for hay — the sides are too low, and it would suit timber better — and the whole picture was painted in a studio in London.
Painted in London from old sketches
The view is the millpond at Flatford on the River Stour. Flatford Mill ground corn and was run by the Constable family for close to a hundred years; it stands a mile from the house at East Bergholt where he was born, and in the painting only the edge of its red brick wall shows, at the far right. The house on the left belonged to the tenant farmer Willy Lott and is still standing. The empty wagon is turning towards the shallow crossing that gave Flatford its name. None of it was painted there. He worked in London from drawings and oil sketches made over twenty years, among them three small studies of Lott's house from 1811 and a full-size oil sketch now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. A horse and rider stood in the foreground of that sketch, survived into the final canvas, and were painted out late.
Nobody bought it, so it went to Paris
The Examiner said it came nearer to the actual look of rural nature than any modern landscape whatever. It did not sell. In 1824 Constable let the Anglo-French dealer John Arrowsmith have it with two other pictures for two hundred and fifty pounds, and Arrowsmith sent them to the Paris Salon, where they caused a commotion. Constable, who never left England, wrote about the peaceful farmhouses of Suffolk being made into a show to amuse the gay and frivolous Parisians. Charles the Tenth gave him a gold medal, chiefly for this picture, and the medal is in the National Gallery's archive. The painting stayed in France, went through a Paris saleroom in 1828 to an impresario, and came back to England about 1838 among eighty pictures bought for a collector in Herefordshire. Henry Vaughan gave it to the National Gallery in 1886.
4 July 2022
Two protesters stepped over the rope and pasted their own version of the painting over it: the same valley with pollution along the horizon and a wrecked car in front of the mill. Then they glued a hand each to the frame. The gallery cleared the room, which had a school group in it, and said afterwards that the frame had minor damage and the varnish some disruption, both of which were dealt with. It was back on the wall the next day. The valley they had chosen to argue with is a working river in Suffolk, painted in a room in London, named by somebody else. The sky is the part he observed hardest, and his critics had a name for the flecks of white he put into the leaves: they called it Constable's snow, and they did not mean it as a compliment.
He called it Landscape: Noon, and nobody bought it. The nickname is the part that stuck.
Some stories are better over a coffee. Fifteen minutes with someone — audio only, not open yet.