John Constable was an English painter born in 1776 in East Bergholt, Suffolk. He studied at the Royal Academy in London before developing his own style of painting landscapes based on direct observation of nature. Constable married Maria Bricknell in 1816 and they had seven children together, though she died in 1828. Constable is regarded as one of the most important English landscape painters of the 19th century and helped influence later Impressionist artists with his animated brushstrokes capturing the atmosphere of nature.