Willie Lott’s Cottage

This is the view today of the scene immortalised in Constable’s probably most famous painting ‘The Hay Wain’. The cottage is much as it was but the trees in the painting have gone, together with the view across to the river meadows where folk are at hay making. The mill pool is also deeper today. Constable’s painting shows a hay wagon or wain heading toward the ‘flat ford’ across the river to collect another load.

What a beautiful picture this is. It hangs in the National Gallery in London. Some decades ago Constable had a reputation for ‘chocolate box’ painting. Today this has largely changed thankfully, seeing as it was completely undeserved. In fact compared to the tradition of the Royal Academy his work was considered rather ‘out there’ and it was quite some time before he was accepted despite his obvious talent. Today we can see that such was his talent that his pictures are among the most popular and well known in the world. This same scene or various along the valley have been painted by many different painters since. Check them out on the web. If you find one as good as this I am a Dutchman.

Current taste is nothing if not peculiar and nowadays many people prefer the rapid oil sketches he made in the open air as preparation, sitting before such scenes as these. A considerable time before the French Impressionists. Sketches of The Hay Wain are at the Victoria & Albert Museum. The really nice thing about this is, to quote the American poet Robert Lowell when asked about two different versions of his poem ‘Waking Early Sunday Morning’. ‘Well they both exist.’

Constable’s father was a wealthy man and owned both the mill and the cottage. Flatford Mill is at our back as we look toward the cottage. I think Constable and other members of the family are buried at East Bergholt.

The tenant farmer of the cottage was a Willie Lott who it is said never spent more than four or so nights away from it in his entire 80 years. A National Trust notice pinned to the wall of Flatford Mill suggests (a little sniffily IMO) that in Constable’s day it was known as ‘Willie Lott’s House’ and they insist that it is properly described as such. It is known the world over as ‘Willie Lott’s Cottage’ however, which seems pretty harmless to me. They are quite right probably that the notion of a quaint cottage became entangled with the whole English Constable chocolate box caboodle. That they should say so is rather ironic. I mean they have kept the mill ‘working’ as some kind of ecological field study centre. One can hardly be against such a thing but it does amuse me that the Trust have to defend the preservation of such a beautiful place. After all if you have travelled long and hard from America or Japan you do not want to find Willie Lott’s Cottage crouching under a motorway flyover. Should you endure such an English pilgrimage you won’t be disappointed thanks to the NT. Though if you want an icecream on a hot summer bank holiday you might be trampled underfoot.

The whole Stour Valley is staggeringly picturesque in an understated southern English way. I use that adjective on purpose. Our impression of this whole countryside is informed by Constable. In a way he has created it even at the same time he was created by it. It is interesting to reflect that the image of England that it conjures was already passing even in his day. But should Willie Lott’s Cottage be flattened tomorrow it will still exist in two dimensions thanks to John Constable.

It is, and I make no bones about it, a source of quiet personal pride that on my mother’s side I am related to Willie Lott. Apparently you can book to stay at the cottage. When I was there I felt like rapping loudly on the door and telling them to get out of my house.