In 1799, when Turner was already a member of the Royal Academy, Constable entered its school as a student. Unlike Turner, Constable painted landscape with an eye to verisimilitude. His more prosaic views of nature, following the traditions of such Dutch masters as Ruisdale and Cyp, were unfashionable. Constable was thirty-nine before he sold a picture, and in his fifties before he was invited to join the Royal Academy.

Constable's career was spent creating poetic expressions of his native Stour Valley. During the summers he would work in the village of East Bergholt, where he was born. This region of Suffolk and the Stour Valley came to be known as Constable country. There he made sketches, both painted and drawn. These "notes" would become the basis for the large and ambitious canvases that he would prepare in London for the annual exhibition at the Royal Academy. Constable's sketches of skies and sites such as Dedham Lock and Mill are regarded today as important works that capture the spirit and feeling of the countryside, possible to attain only when the artist is working directly from nature.

One of the earliest Western European artists to study changing light and atmospheric conditions so closely, Constable kept notes and diaries recording weather conditions and times of day. In working out-of-doors, Constable was anticipating the direction that the Impressionists would later take with such conviction. But for him, producing large canvases outside was impractical: his "six-footers", designed to catch the attention of Royal Academy visitors, were painted in his studio, as was common practice until the Impressionists decided to do more than sketch outside.