Travellers in Italy from Grand Tourists to Turner

John Constable, Hampstead Heath, with Harrow in the Distance  c.1820–2

Constable wrote that living in Hampstead, then a small village north of London, allowed him to ‘unite a town & country life’. He rented a house there almost every summer from 1819 to 1826. From 1827 he rented a house there year-round, keeping a studio in central London. With its clean air, green heath and wide, expansive views, Hampstead delighted Constable. He made several outdoor oil sketches of this view. Harrow church can be seen on the extreme right. When this work was first exhibited in the 1880s it became the most popular painting for artists to make copies of.

Gallery label, October 2023

John Constable, The Church Porch, East Bergholt  exhibited 1810

Three figures sit and talk outside the church in East Bergholt, the village in Suffolk where Constable was born. A man, wearing a red cloak and tricorn hat, and a woman lean on the tombs while a younger girl sits opposite. These figures, old and young, and their placement in the graveyard may have been a deliberate way to build a deeper meaning into the scene, about the passage of time and our mortality. Though it is small, this was an important work for Constable – we think it was the first painting he submitted himself for exhibition at the Royal Academy.

Gallery label, October 2023

John Constable, A Lane near Flatford  c.1810–11

Constable’s studio was full of oil sketches made outdoors like this one. Working quickly, Constable would have mixed together colours on the sketch itself – as seen in the white streaks in the lane. His aim was to capture fleeting effects like the movement of wind through trees. He may have liked this spot on a lane near his father’s mill because of the way the view opens up in two directions around the central mass of trees. He used the figure of the boy drinking from the stream in his painting The Cornfield, which is now in the National Gallery.

Gallery label, October 2023

John Constable, The Mill Stream. Verso: Night Scene with Bridge  c.1810

Painted quickly outdoors on a bright day, this study is the setting for one of Constable’s most famous paintings, The Hay Wain (now in the National Gallery). It shows the view from the forecourt of Flatford Mill across a side stream of the River Stour in Suffolk. The stream had been diverted under the mill to power the waterwheel. The white house is Willy Lott’s House, named after the tenant farmer who lived there for over 80 years.

Gallery label, October 2023

John Constable, Stoke-by-Nayland  c.1810–11

Using fewer and broader brushstrokes than in other of his sketches, Constable quickly captures the stark contrast between the bright sky and shaded copse. A figure in white carrying a bundle on her head stands out against the shadows. The scene is Stoke-by-Nayland, a village in Suffolk only a few miles from where Constable grew up. Even after he moved to London in 1799, he regularly returned to the Stour Valley to sketch outdoors and gather material for large exhibition paintings. The banks of the River Stour ‘made me a painter’, he later claimed.

Gallery label, October 2023

John Constable, The Sea near Brighton  1826

Brighton, on the south coast of England, was a place many Londoners escaped to. Some went there for fun, others for rest. Constable rented a house for his family there in the hope that the fresh sea air and change of scene would restore the health of his wife, Maria. This painting is one of only a handful of oil sketches Constable made outdoors in winter. He had written on being impressed by ‘the magnificence of the sea’ and of how seabirds, like those seen here, ‘add to the wildness and to the sentiment of melancholy’ at the shore.

Gallery label, October 2023

John Constable, A Windmill near Brighton  1824

Though he didn’t like the crowds that flocked to Brighton, Constable found its setting inspiring. Exploring the quiet of the downs behind the town, he discovered a working landscape of windmills, crops and grazing animals. Constable’s composition, with the windmill partially obscured by a mound, gives a good sense of this undulating landscape. It falls away on the right to offer a glimpse of the sea. This sketch was painted on 27 July 1824. He wrote a note about weather conditions on the back: ‘very fine morning after rain’.

Gallery label, October 2023

John Constable, Cloud Study  1822

In 1821 and 1822, Constable studied clouds and the sky intensively, mainly over Hampstead Heath, north of London. He often inscribed the date, time of day, wind direction and general weather conditions on the back of the painting, indicating an interest in meteorology. In this instance, the inscription on the back includes the time of day ’11 o’clock’ and ‘noon,’ suggesting Constable painted this in an hour. Capturing the changeability of clouds as they drifted above him was a challenging exercise. Constable’s lively brushwork, colour tones and understanding of the structure and movement of clouds made him adept at expressing mood in landscape painting.

Gallery label, October 2023

John Constable, A Cornfield  ?1817

We think that Constable began this painting outdoors. He did so because he wanted to faithfully capture light, texture and atmosphere. He may have added details like the carefully-painted ears of corn above the bank on the left-hand side in his studio. Look carefully and you will see that the trees on right were once higher. Constable probably lowered them, increasing the space given to sky, when working up this sketch for a painting he exhibited in 1826, The Cornfield, which is now in the National Gallery.

Gallery label, October 2023

John Constable, Maria Constable with Two of her Children. Verso: Copy after Teniers  c.1820

This rapidly painted sketch captures a tender family moment. Constable and his wife Maria had seven children. The two seen here sitting on her knee are probably the eldest, John Charles (born December 1817), and Maria Louisa (born July 1819). Constable and Maria had struggled to be together. Anxious that he made so little money from his paintings, Maria’s family only gave their blessing when Constable inherited money from his father. They married in 1816, seven years after falling in love. Tragically, Maria’s pregnancies weakened her fragile health and she died of tuberculosis in 1828, aged 41. Constable became a single father to their children.

Gallery label, October 2023

John Constable, Flatford Mill (‘Scene on a Navigable River’)  1816–7

Typical of the kind of painting for which Constable became famous, this is a snapshot of working life at his father’s business premises on the River Stour. It shows a barge being disconnected from a tow horse, ready to be ‘poled’ under Flatford bridge, in the lower left-hand corner. It is the largest painting Constable worked on outdoors. X-rays show us that he changed it significantly in the studio, painting out a horse on the towpath and replacing it with the two boys in the distance. Can you see where Constable has signed his name as if it has been written in the dirt track?

Gallery label, October 2023

John Constable, Hampstead Heath with a Rainbow  1836

Constable was proud of this painting. He called it ‘one of my best bits of Heath’, ‘so fresh – so bright... & sunshiney’. It depicts Branch Hill Pond on Hampstead Heath, north of London. The Hampstead Heath ponds were dug as reservoirs to meet the growing water demand of a rapidly expanding city. Sand was extracted for building works and the flooded pits became watering holes for animals, as seen here, and swimming. Constable’s late work often featured rainbows. He admired the way Old Master painter Rubens had painted them and saw in them a sign of hope.

Gallery label, October 2023

John Constable, Brightwell Church and Village  1815

This view of the village of Brightwell near Ipswich shows the winding road that leads past houses and fields to the church above the trees on the horizon. Typically, Constable pays close attention to the light and colour of the landscape. White flowers and red poppies stand out against the fields and dusty bank in the foreground while pools of sunlight catch the golden fields in the distance. The Reverend FH Barnwell commissioned Constable to paint the view, as he had a special interest in the village.

Gallery label, October 2023

John Constable, The Glebe Farm  c.1830

From around 1828, Constable’s paintings became darker. He conjured turbulent skies and applied paint using dabs and dashes. He grew obsessive about white highlights, believing they created ‘freshness’. The critics, however, called this effect ‘Constable’s ‘snow’. ‘Glebe’ means church-owned land. Constable’s supporter, the Bishop of Salisbury, had lived in this house during his time in Suffolk. Constable painted at least four other versions of this view after the Bishop’s death in 1825. He experimented on this one, adding a spire to the church and a rainbow on the right. He also tried changing the church into a windmill.

Gallery label, October 2023

John Constable, The Opening of Waterloo Bridge (‘Whitehall Stairs, June 18th, 1817’)  exhibited 1832

This River Thames view is the largest painting Constable exhibited. He worked on it, and worried about it, on and off for 13 years. Constable wanted to show he could paint a grand cityscape, but it proved a challenging subject. He struggled with the composition, calling it a ‘blister’. A puzzling element is the group of industrial towers above the Lord Mayor’s barge on the right – these were not yet built when Waterloo Bridge opened. Whatever his reasons for including them, they signal the rapid industrialisation of the Thames’s south bank.

Gallery label, October 2023

John Constable, The Gleaners, Brighton  1824

With his back turned to Brighton, Constable captures a blustery sky above the downs that surround the town. Two women, the gleaners, gather wheat ready for milling in the windmills nearby. It was typical of Constable to be so interested in the everyday work that happened on the edges of the fashionable resort. As he often did, Constable wrote the time of day the sketch records on the back: ‘Brighton – Noon, looking N.E. Augst 20, 1824’. Later on, he extended the sketch to include the right-hand windmill and added clouds above the figures of the gleaners.

Gallery label, October 2023

John Constable, Chain Pier, Brighton  1826–7

Constable first went to Brighton in 1824, taking his wife Maria in an attempt to restore her failing health. He visited her there frequently in the mid-1820s and made many drawings and sketches, but this is his only large painting of a Brighton subject.

The 1820s were some of the busiest years of Brighton’s development as a fashionable seaside resort. Here Constable shows the bustling life of the beach against a backdrop of Brighton’s new hotels, residential quarters and the Chain Pier itself. The pier opened in 1823, shortly before Constable’s first visit, but was destroyed by storm in 1896.

Gallery label, September 2004

John Constable, East Bergholt House  c.1809

This was the house in which Constable was born. It no longer exists but is recorded in many drawings and paintings by the artist. In 1832 Constable published a volume of prints after his work, titled ‘English Landscape Scenery’. He chose an image of his house as the lead image (the frontispiece), and wrote beneath it: ‘This place was the origin of my Fame’.

Gallery label, October 2023