John Constable is one of the most celebrated and influential of all English romantic artists, and his most famous paintings are among the best-loved images in British Art. Painted in 1817, this highly important sketch is an early preparatory study for The White Horse (The Frick collects ion, New York; fig. 1), the first of Constable's famous ‘Six-Footers’, which he exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1819. One of the artist’s most celebrated works, The White Horse is a seminal painting in the history of British art and only a very small number of preparatory studies were made for it, including the full-scale sketch now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (fig. 2).

This is one of only two known small-scale compositional oil sketches that relate to The White Horse, both of which were taken from approximately the same angle. Probably painted on the spot in the summer of 1817, with the artist responding directly to the landscape, the composition relates to a small pencil drawing of the scene made in a sketchbook Constable used in Suffolk in 1814 (Victoria and Albert Museum, London). Here, however, the artist has extended the view to the right to include the whole of the thatched barn and as such it represents a crucial development in the particularly complex evolution of this celebrated composition.

The finished painting depicts a view from the right bank of the River Stour, at Dedham Vale, near East Bergholt, where the artist lived as a child, showing a small reach of the river just below Flatford Lock, where Constable’s father owned a mill, looking towards Willy Lott's Cottage. This sketch concentrates on the central group of buildings which make up the focal part of the composition, with the gable end and chimney of Willy Lott's Cottage itself – one of the key images in Constable’s art – seen through the trees on the left, a thatched boat shed on the far bank of the river and the roof line of a large barn which all appear in the finished painting. A larger, upright oil sketch which focuses on the group of buildings on the left, sold in these rooms in 2019 (Private collects ion; fig. 3) and a small study in oils of the barge and eponymous horse itself (Private collects ion; fig. 4), together with a more detailed pencil drawing of the boathouse (Private collects ion), represent the only other known preparatory works by the artist for this pivotal and iconic work.¹

The White Horse – ‘the most important picture Constable ever painted’

Accurately described by the artist’s friend and biographer, C.R. Leslie as ‘on many accounts the most important picture Constable ever painted’,² The White Horse represents a vital turning point in Constable’s career. It was the first in a series of six monumental Stour Valley compositions, known as the artist’s celebrated ‘six footers’, which were exhibited annually at the Royal Academy between 1819 and 1825. These epic canvases represent the culmination of a process which Constable had begun as early as 1812, with a smaller view of Flatford Lock and Mill, and all share a common theme – each depicting a scene within a three-mile radius of Constable’s family home in East Bergholt. All six have a very particular narrative, illustrating familiar scenes of everyday life on the river under a bright summer sky. They are, for many, Constable’s defining works, and include The White Horse, 1819 (The Frick collects ion, New York); The Young Waltonians, 1820 (The National Gallery, London); The Hay Wain, 1821 (The National Gallery, London; fig. 5); View of the Stour near Dedham, 1822 (Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino); The Lock, 1824 (Private collects ion; fig. 6); and The Leaping Horse, 1825 (Royal Academy of Arts, London). These six pictures largely cemented the artist’s contemporary reputation and have served as the basis for his fame ever since. For many they define the pinnacle of the artist’s career.

The White Horse was critically well received at the Academy exhibition of 1819 – the correspondent for the Examiner praising it for being more like nature than any existing landscape painting and compared Constable’s art favourably to that of Turner; whilst the Literary Chronicle wrote: ‘What a grasp of everything beautiful in rural scenery’ and predicted that Constable would soon be the leading landscape painter in the nation.³ The painting was Constable’s only exhibit of 1819 and it was therefore off the back of the success of The White Horse that he was finally elected to the long-awaited position of Associate Member of the Royal Academy (A.R.A), by a substantial majority of his peers, that same year – ultimate validation that the transformation of his artistic practice, which he had been working steadily towards for the last seven years, had paid off. Importantly, it also sold, and sold quickly, for the substantial price of 100 guineas (without the frame), thus giving Constable a measure of commercial success and independent financial security that he had not previously known in his career. Purchased by his close friend Archdeacon Fisher, it is a measure of the significance that the artist placed upon The White Horse that in 1829, when Fisher was heavily in debt, Constable bought the picture back at its original price of 100 guineas and retained it for the rest of his life.

The gestation of The White Horse was a particularly complicated and protracted one for the artist, however, and the painting was ultimately the fruit of a seed of ambition that had been planted much earlier and required many years of labour to fulfil. It is in this complex gestation and development that the present sketch plays such an important role.

The Sketch and the Significance of 1817

The year 1817 was a pivotal and particularly complex period in Constable's art. The previous year, two seismic events had taken place in the artist’s life. In May his father, Golding Constable, had died and the ensuing division of family property left him with an income sufficient to finally marry his long-t.mes love, Maria Bicknell, despite her family’s opposition. This he duly did on 2 October 1816. His life, which had hitherto been a peripatetic existence, partly based in Suffolk and partly in London, now became more settled in the capital, and in December the newly married couple moved into their first home at 63 Charlotte Street in Bloomsbury. He would in future spend little t.mes in his native Suffolk, focusing instead on his life and career in London, and his determination to paint larger, more ambitious landscapes.

The White Horse was painted entirely in Constable’s London studio, the first t.mes he had made a painting on a large scale of a Suffolk subject without direct reference to the landscape itself. It was probably for this reason that he adopted, again for the first t.mes , the device of painting a full-scale sketch (also painted in the studio in London), in order to map out the composition on a one-to-one scale, prior to starting work on what would be the finished canvas. Hitherto Constable’s practice, up to 1816, had been to paint landscapes out of doors, on the spot, with direct reference to the landscape itself – often referred to as en plein air. By at least 1814 he was not only sketching out of doors, but painting, or at least mostly painting, fully finished exhibition paintings on the spot, directly in front of the motif itself. One such is Wivenhoe Park (National Gallery of Art, Washington), painted largely in the summer of 1816 and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1817, which is almost forty inches wide. By 1816, however, with his ambition growing, it became clear that he had taken on-the-spot painting as far as he could and was beginning to realize the limitations of this method. With the increased pressure for commercial success, if he was to compete with the likes of Turner, John Martin, James Ward and Augustus Wall Callcott, all of whom were exhibiting monumental landscapes at the Academy, he would need to paint on a far more ambitions scale – a scale that was simply not logistically possible out in the open fields.

In order to paint both the full-scale sketch and the finished painting entirely in the studio, however, he would have needed to refer to abundant source material brought back from Suffolk. Between mid-July and October 1817, therefore, Constable and his wife had made one last, long trip to East Bergholt for an extended summer holiday – what has been described as Constable’s ‘valedictory’ visit to the place of his birth.⁴ The place that, in his own words, had ‘made him a painter’. Possibly anticipating, as Reynolds suggested, that this might be his last chance to record his native landscape in detail, before the cares of a family caught up with him, Constable avidly made a large number of drawings and oil sketches on this trip. Back in London in November of that year he showed these sketches to his close friend Joseph Farington, and there are several references to them in the latter’s diary. On 11 November 1817 Farington wrote: ‘Constable called & told me he had passed 10 weeks at Bergholt in Suffolk with his friends, & painted many studies’; and on 24 November he noted that Constable’s fellow artist, W.R. Biggs, R.A., had spoken ‘favourably of Constable’s oil sketches done in the summer’. On 31 January 1818, Farington further noted ‘Constable I called on and saw him and his wife & sat with him some t.mes … I saw a number of his painted sketches & drawings done last summer, but he had not any principal work in hand’.

Despite the wealth of evidence for the existence of many oil sketches produced in the summer of 1817, only one recorded work is securely dated to this period, and that has been untraced since it appeared in C.R. Leslie’s sale at Foster’s in 1860 (Reynolds, no. 17.24). Both Graham Reynolds and Charles Rhyne, however, suggested this sketch was probably a study from nature and that it is likely to be one of those made in the summer of 1817. Annie Lyles, whilst allowing that it could also have been executed earlier than this, agrees that the work is almost certainly a plein air sketch, created on the spot directly from nature. A similarly energetic and loosely handled sketch of East Bergholt Church in the Durban Museum and Art Gallery (Reynolds, no. 17.30; fig. 7) was also proposed by Reynolds as belonging to this group of 1817 sketches which, like the present work, also relates to a smaller pencil sketch of the same view (Private collects ion, New York) and Leslie Parris and Ian Fleming-Williams subsequently identified several works which they believed belong to this group.

Constable's Landscape: The Stour Valley and the Six-Foot Series

Constable Country, as it has come to be known today – that area of the Stour Valley around Dedham Vale, on the border between Suffolk and Essex, bounded on the west by the village of Nayland, and on the east by the sea – has become synonymous with the great painter who immortalised its bucolic river meadows and shaded waterways. A fertile and workmanlike landscape centred on the village and parish of Dedham, which had been a prosperous cloth-working town in the Middle Ages, in Constable’s day the Vale was principally an agricultural centre, the main industry being founded on the production of wheat, barley and oats. Encompassing the villages of East Bergholt, Stratford St Mary, Langham and Stoke-by-Nayland, it is today an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and was a part of the country with which Constable was particularly intimate.

The artist's parents, Golding and Ann Constable, lived at East Bergholt, where the young painter was born and brought up. A prosperous miller and successful businessman, his father owned watermills at Flatford and Dedham, and a windmill on East Bergholt Heath. Golding traded corn and coal out of Mistley Wharf on the North Essex coast, operating a fleet of commercial barges on the river Stour (called lighters), as well as three dry-docks at Flatford for their construction and repair, and two sea going Thames barges for transporting goods between Mistley and London. He also owned a coal yard at Brantham and served as one of the Commissioners of the River Stour Navigation. Golding’s family had lived in the area for generations, and by 1774 he was sufficiently prosperous to buy a piece of land at East Bergholt and build a substantial mansion, where two years later his fourth child, John, was born, together with 93 acres of arable land around the village which the family farmed. The Constables’ social position, and the fact that his father owned a large portion of it, gave the young Constable unfettered access to much of the land around his childhood home, and an intimate knowledge of its gently rolling hills, picturesque villages, verdant riverbanks and fertile meadows. It was this visual reservoir, accumulated during the halcyon days of his childhood exploring along the banks of the Stour, that would not only inspire Constable’s earliest endeavours in paint but provided him with much of the raw materials for many of his greatest paintings.

Constable’s love for the essentially flat and un-emphatic landscape of his native Suffolk, with its ‘gentle declivities, its woods and rivers…’,⁵ so devoid of the sort of obvious pictorial potential that attracted artists and tourists alike to other regions of the country, such as the Lake District or Wales, was a notable deviation from the usual habits of contemporary landscape painters. Until at least 1821, Constable almost exclusively painted places that he knew, and with which he was completely familiar, in marked contrast, for instance, to Turner’s more typical practice and his voracious appetite for touring. This had obvious consequences for his art, for Constable knew his landscape, both over t.mes and from numerous angles. He would have both seen it change over t.mes and have been conscious of the degree to which a limited area of terrain could be differentiated topographically, with this local intimacy and memory both informing his paintings. This was a very different order of knowledge to that which most contemporary landscape painters possessed of their subjects, and applies equally to the local industry and figural activity within his pictures as it does to topographical familiarity. These are the scenes of Constable’s childhood and he knew them with an intimacy that could be surpassed by no other artist. As he said himself, ‘… the sound of water escaping Mill dams… Willows, Old rotten Banks, slimy posts, & brickwork, I love such things… As Long as I do paint I shall never cease to paint such places. They have always been my delight.’⁶

¹ Reynolds, text vol., pp. 30–31, nos 19.3, 19.4 and 19.5, and plates vol., pls 70–72; and Replica Shoes ’s, London, Early British Paintings, 9 July 2009, lot 26.

² C. R. Leslie, Memoirs of the Life of John Constable, 1843, J. Mayne (ed.), London 1951, p. 76;

³ Quoted in Reynolds, p. 28.

⁴ Reynolds, p. 28.

⁵ John Constable’s Discourses, R.B. Beckett (ed.), Ipswich 1978, pp. 12–13.

⁶ From a letter from Constable to Archdeacon Fisher, in John Constable’s Correspondence, VI, The Fishers, R.B. Beckett (ed.), Ipswich 1970, p. 155.