{"id":415772,"date":"2026-05-07T06:03:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-07T06:03:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/415772\/"},"modified":"2026-05-07T06:03:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-07T06:03:08","slug":"john-constable-gallery-opens-at-gainsborough-house-sudbury","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/415772\/","title":{"rendered":"John Constable gallery opens at Gainsborough House Sudbury"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\n  The new exhibition at Gainsborough&#8217;s House, Sudbury, showcases John Constable&#8217;s greatest painting and opened at the weekend and contains one of the artist&#8217;s greatest paintings.\n<\/p>\n<p>\n  The Leaping Horse, on loan from the Royal Academy in London, is a six-foot piece which secured Constable&#8217;s position as a major landscape painter.\n<\/p>\n<p>\n  Calvin Winner, executive director, Gainsborough\u2019s House, said: &#8220;The Leaping Horse, painted in 1825, is thought by many to be Constable&#8217;s greatest painting.\n<\/p>\n<p>\n  &#8220;It depicts a barge horse jumping one of the barriers erected along the path by the River Stour to prevent cattle from straying.&#8221;\n<\/p>\n<p>\n  <img   width=\"100%\"\/>Calvin Winner, Executive Director at Gainsborough&#8217;s House, Sudbury (Image: Gainsborough&#8217;s House, Sudbury)\n<\/p>\n<p>\n  Mr Winner said: &#8220;Dedham Church is present, and the bridge marks a county boundary \u2013 the horse is in fact leaping over a crossing which takes the horse and rider from Essex into his native Suffolk.\n<\/p>\n<p>\n  &#8220;The Leaping Horse takes for its subject the traffic on the River Stour, and Constable depicts a scene in Suffolk where he spent his &#8216;careless boyhood&#8217;. He claimed that the Suffolk countryside &#8216;made him a painter&#8217;.&#8221;\n<\/p>\n<p>\n  <img   width=\"100%\"\/>John Constable&#8217;s The Leaping Horse at Gainsborough&#8217;s House (Image: Gainsborough&#8217;s House)\n<\/p>\n<p>\n  The exhibition also presents pieces from Sudbury-born portrait and landscape artist Thomas Gainsborough and Romantic artist J. M. W. Turner.\n<\/p>\n<p>\n  Mr Winner said: &#8220;Both Constable and Gainsborough were famous for coming from the Stour River Valley, so to bring these two artists together is a wonderful thing.\n<\/p>\n<p>\n  &#8220;Born in East Bergholt, Constable was a great admirer of his Suffolk forebear Thomas Gainsborough, telling a friend, \u2018I fancy I see Gainsborough in every hedge and hollow tree\u2019.\n<\/p>\n<p>\n  &#8220;It&#8217;s also a celebration of the Suffolk countryside as well, which is arguably England&#8217;s greatest artistic landscape, having inspired these two wonderful artists.&#8221;\n<\/p>\n<p>\n  <img   width=\"100%\"\/>Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788). Landscape with Cattle, a Young Man Courting a Milkmaid, early 1770s. (Image: Gainsborough&#8217;s House, Sudbury)\n<\/p>\n<p>\n  The exhibition, which celebrates the magnificence of landscape art in Britain in the 18th and early 19th century, will run from this weekend until mid-October.\n<\/p>\n<p>\n  It is the first time Constable&#8217;s The Leaping Horse will be exhibited in his home county, and Mr Winner encourages as many people as possible to see this wonderful array of Suffolk landscape paintings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The new exhibition at Gainsborough&#8217;s House, Sudbury, showcases John Constable&#8217;s greatest painting and opened at the weekend and&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":415773,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[442,498,499,500,501,156,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-415772","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/415772","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=415772"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/415772\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/415773"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=415772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=415772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=415772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}