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I first saw John Constable’s 1821 painting The Hay Wain as a postcard with cruise missiles brutally stacked in the wooden cart and pointing at the sky. Peter Kennard’s anti-nuke photomontage is just one of the many parodies and travesties this image of a seemingly eternal rustic Britain keeps provoking. A few months ago, a newspaper cartoon depicted a ballistic missile from Iran speeding through Constable’s painting. But when I visited Ipswich to see its Hay Wain exhibition at the start of the latest heatwave it was the climate making a scorching, ironic comment on this temperate scene.

Inside this Tudor house, grey, blue and brown masses of rain-promising cloud hung above Constable’s painted Suffolk fields, dappling them with shade. But outside the grass was straw yellow and the landscape around Dedham Vale and the River Stour, where Constable was born and in which The Hay Wain and many more of his works lovingly linger, appeared to have been blowtorched into oblivion.

Global heating may seem to be yet another joke on The Hay Wain’s supposedly comforting, Little English vision, but actually it points the way to a better understanding of a much-stereotyped masterpiece. And it’s liberating just bringing it from its usual home in the National Gallery to Christchurch Mansion (which has a fine collection of Constables as well as works by another local hero, Gainsborough): here you see the painting’s scale and ambition all over again, how it grows naturally out of Constable’s lifelong obsession with the countryside where he grew up.

The show is subtitled Walking Constable’s Landscape but there’s no walking involved unless you take a side trip (well worthwhile) to the local places he painted. Instead, it’s about Constable’s own walks and reveries, recorded in drawings, watercolours and oil sketches that hang around the six-foot-wide main attraction. The earliest item is a piece of graffiti the 16-year-old Constable carved on a beam cut from his father’s windmill at East Bergholt – in which he portrays the mill itself.

Even as a teenager Constable was driven to record, and preserve, his countryside. He was not naive; he knew London and painted its industrial chimneys belching carbon into the atmosphere. His lifetime pretty much encompasses the Industrial Revolution: in other parts of Britain the blast furnaces of Coalbrookdale were illuminating the night, steam was gathering power and Midlands factories were perfecting the production line. He knew all this but preferred to paint, to hold on to, a rural world where people still lived in nature instead of conquering it with machines.

In his beloved corner of Suffolk he shows his parents growing foodstuffs for subsistence in the 1815 work Golding Constable’s Kitchen Garden. Taking a broader view, he looks across the entire Vale of Dedham and sees a subtle, centuries-old blend of buildings with fields, woods, water. As you follow his strolling eye you become ever more aware of lush green trees and grass caressing old villages, enfolding people in a cool embrace.

Constable gets caricatured as a conservative. In reality he is a conservationist. The Hay Wain, his most elegiac work, is about space and time. The sheer amount of space it takes in is overwhelming. In the foreground is the mouldering hulk of Willy Lott’s house by the shallow brown and green waters of Flatford mill pond. But beyond are fields that stretch for miles in a flat dappled vista that’s a miracle of perspective. Constable is going out of his way to suggest this painting holds a whole world.

In this epic setting we get a warm sense of time’s slowness. The hay wain seems stuck in the water, or just resting, while a boy whiles away the day fishing and a dog pauses to watch. It’s not a phoney pastoral from a pampered aristocratic perspective: this is a working landscape and Constable fills it with rural toil, from the woman doing laundry to a row of tiny white-smocked reapers and a second, far-off hay wain being loaded.

What Constable and Gainsborough brought to landscape was a sense of movement. The light seems to actually change as you contemplate The Hay Wain. Earlier landscape art, by the likes of Claude and Poussin, had created eternal, perfect scenes peopled by characters from classical myth. Constable jokes about this in The Hay Wain. The dog stands on a beach that is curved like a vast bay in some sun-kissed canvas by Claude: its a witty play on scale, summoning classical splendour only to rub it in that we are looking at a small corner of Suffolk where nothing much is happening.

As is well known, Constable painted “six footers” so he could get his habitually small-scale, open air art some attention at exhibitions. But in The Hay Wain he exposes the absurdity of that. You want epic? Here’s an epic where nothing happens. Nothing new anyway. Reapers reap. The cart is stalled. And the wet cool sky refreshes you.

Then you emerge into the shelterless sky of this uncanny summer and everything has changed.

• The Hay Wain: Walking Constable’s Landscape is at Christchurch Mansion, Ipswich, from 11 July to 4 October