• The Vale of Dedham is an 1828 oil painting by the English painter John Constable which depicts Dedham Vale on the Essex-Suffolk border in eastern England.
  • In 1802, at the age of twenty-six John Constable completed his first major work entitled Dedham Vale which is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
  • Constable's most famous paintings include Wivenhoe Park (1816), Dedham Vale (1821) and The Hay Wain (1821).
  • The Vale of Dedham is a dazzlingly clear, light-filled painting, the resolution of believable distance in perspective with a lucid two-dimensional organisation or ‘design’.
  • A fertile and workmanlike landscape centred on the village and parish of Dedham, which had been a prosperous cloth-working town in the Middle Ages...
  • The composition of The Vale of Dedham was in part inspired by Claude Lorrain’s Hagar and the Angel.
  • The viewer’s eye is led across the painting from the foreground along the river to the distant focal point of the distant tower of Dedham church.
  • The Vale of Dedham is one of the many paintings by John Constable that depicts the area known as Dedham Vale.
  • As we launch our Greentraveller's Guide to Dedham Vale, our writer follows in the footsteps of John ConstableYou can hardly take a step in this part of the...
  • The building shown in the centre middle-distance is the property named as ‘Dedham Valley’ on the Chapman and André map of 1777 2 and the first edition of...