IN THE autumn of 1939, the Minister of Labour and National Service approached the Pilgrim Trust to invite a number of artists to make “topographical water-colour drawings of places and buildings of characteristic national interest, particularly those exposed to the danger of destruction by the operations of war”.

The project came to be known as “Recording the face of changing Britain”, and its county-by-county survey concentrated on coastal counties, later adding Middlesex and London. In total, 1549 works by 97 artists covered 32 English counties and four in Wales, and the whole collection was passed to the custody of the V&A.

In 1946, OUP published a four-volume series of the graphics, which open with an undistinguished work by Walter Bayes depicting the gateway to the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, with the celestial and terrestrial globes of 1752. The counties of Essex and Suffolk merit 43 drawings, but none of them depicts the Englishness of Constable country around East Bergholt and Dedham Vale.

At first sight, the omission might seem surprising, but John Constable (1776-1837) had recorded much of the landscape of the Stour Valley which, maintained today by the National Trust, has little changed. The NT produces a booklet of seven of his memorable views of the area, which, if you ignore the poor colour reproduction of the paintings themselves, provides a handy guide to the surrounding area.

In 1937, British Railways had celebrated the centenary of the artist’s death with a poster “John Constable RA at Flatford Mill”. A painter in top hat and tails is painting a Scene on a Navigable River that is reckoned to date to 1816 (Tate), the year of Pride and Prejudice and when Constable moved from his cramped studio in a small cottage in East Bergholt to London and to marriage.

© The National Gallery, LondonThe Hay Wain (1821) by John Constable

Rather more successfully, the L.N.E.R had earlier (1930-33) employed Walter E. Spradbery and, jointly, Christopher Nevinson and Richard Wynne (“CW”) for two posters of Flatford Mill, which had for some years been the home of Constable’s family. Kenneth Steel produced a poster for British Railways of William Lott’s house.

And, for those who did not travel, many of Constable’s landscapes, with their iconic “Englishness”, would have been known from the decoration of biscuit tins, teapots, and cheap reproduction prints. Constable had a wide following. But it was not always so, as this exhibition makes clear from studying what is to many his most famous picture.

This exhibition is the fourth in a series that has concentrated on single works in the collection to look more deeply at the context and meaning of each, whether the portrait by Manet of Eva Gonzalez, a newly acquired work by Jean-Étienne Liotard, or, most recently, Degas’s painting of a French aerial artiste, Miss La La.

It focuses on The Hay Wain, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy as Landscape: Noon in May 1821. It failed to sell, but attracted the interest of the French painter and lithographer Géricault. When it was exhibited in the 1824 Paris Salon, King Charles X conferred a gold medal on the artist. It finally entered the national collection in 1886.

This is the first time that it has returned to public display in Trafalgar Square since it was vandalised in July 2022 as part of the Just Stop Oil protests, when a student, Eben Lazarus, joined by the co-founder of the movement, Hannah Hunt, both of Trowbridge, Wiltshire, damaged the picture and the frame.

Writing a review of books published at the time of the Tate’s bicentennial exhibition, Michael Kitson warned readers of The Sunday Times, “Constable is an easy artist to enjoy and to idolise but difficult to write about.” All his pictures seem the quintessence of Englishness and invite many to copy him; “For fifty years countless amateur painters have done, fatally, just that.”

© Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut Paul Mellon CollectionSketch for “The Haywain” (c.1820) by John Constable, on loan from Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut, Paul Mellon Collection

Here is no Sunday painter exhibiting a daub, but a self-taught late-Georgian artist who carefully crafted his own understanding of chiaroscuro. His preferred title makes clear his interest in the effects of light and shade, as many of his titles do. It was his friend the Bishop of Salisbury, John Fisher, who first dubbed it “The Hay-Wain” in a letter of February 14, 1821, while the composition was still unfinished.

Although he had sketched the millpond often enough, he enlisted the help of another local Suffolk artist, his friend Johnny Dunthorne, to send him a sketch of what his own brother Abram called “a scrave or harvest waggon”. That from a letter of 23 February shows how complex and unseasonal the invented scene was. As David Piper, one of the NT staff in charge of maintaining the landscape around Flatford Mill and at Sudbury, Orford, Pin Mill, and Hatfield Forest, pointed out to me, the cart can be headed nowhere.

But the contrivance of the composition also suggests Constable’s awareness of other painters, such as Peter Paul Rubens and Salvator Rosa, who had celebrated the land in which they lived and the daily lives of a rural community. The importance of that had begun to shift in Constable’s lifetime with increased mechanisation, the industrial demands on infrastructure, urbanisation, and the emergence of a two-party state.

“Discover Constable and ‘The Hay Wain’” is at the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London WC2, until 2 February. www.nationalgallery.org.uk