John Constable R.A. 1776-1837

This lively open air sketch, dating from 1812, shows the River Stour with Flatford Lock on the right, and looks upstream to the footbridge and Bridge Cottage.  It is one of a small group of studies for the picture entitled ‘Landscape: Boys fishing’, which Constable exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1813,  and which he showed in 1814 at the British Institution with the title ‘Landscape: a lock on the Stour’.

Until the death of his father in 1816 and his marriage in October that year, Constable considered East Bergholt House to be his home, and he stayed there for large parts of each year, particularly in the summer. In his painting he focussed on local subjects, and the largest proportion of his major exhibited works are represented by his paintings of scenes from the banks of the river Stour and the slopes surrounding it. In one of the most quoted passages in his correspondence with his friend Fisher, he wrote: "But I should paint my own places best – Painting is but another word for feeling. I associate "my careless boyhood " to all that lies on the banks of the Stour. They made me a painter (& I am gratefull) that is I had often thought of pictures of them before I had ever touched a pencil." (R.B. Beckett ed., John Constable’s Correspondence: V1: the Fishers, 1968, pp. 77-78).

Flatford Mill was the centre of his family’s business, and it is not surprising that the first coherent group of paintings of the river Stour were focussed on the mill. He first drew it in 1810 when he did a group of open-air sketches. In January 1811, his mother wrote to him: "Your uncle …was so much taken with one of your sketches of Flatford Mills, House & C. that he has requested you to finish it for him". In the summer of 1811 he did further Flatford sketches, and wrote to Maria in November that he had ‘tried Flatford Mill again". The finished painting (Thomson Collection), based on a group of sketches, was exhibited in 1812 at the Royal Academy under the title A Water-Mill.  It was well received and Constable was flattered to receive favourable comments from Benjamin West, then President of the Royal Academy. For his exhibit in 1813, for which the present sketch is a study, Constable continued to work at Flatford and both the 1812 and the 1813 exhibits include the lock in their foregrounds with a building seen across the water as the focal point. In the 1813 exhibit the view however looks upstream rather than downstream, and the focal point is not the buildings of Flatford Mill but Bridge Cottage. Both paintings show images of boys fishing.

The finished picture which Constable exhibited in 1813 was, with the exception of an untraced Lake District Landscape, the largest landscape so far painted by the artist. It was praised by Robert Hunt as "silvery , sparkling, and true to the greyish-green colouring of our English summer landscapes" (Examiner, 30^th May 1813, p.348). It was later engraved by David Lucas in 1831 as part of his famous English Landscape series. Graham Reynolds records four oil studies for the composition as well as two related drawings (Trees at Flatford – Fondazione Horne, Florence, and The Lock Gates, Flatford – Private Collection). The exhibited picture may be the painting brought from Leggatt by the 1^st Baron Fairhaven who bequeathed it to the National Trust (Anglesey Abbey, the Fairhaven Trust – Graham Reynolds, op.cit, no.13.1).

The area around Flatford continued to be a source for many of Constable's important paintings. Willy Lott’s House, to the south-east of Flatford Mill, formed the setting for The White Horse (Frick Collection, New York), The Hay-Wain (National Gallery) and The Valley Farm (Tate Gallery). In 1815, he exhibited Boat Building (Victorian and Albert Museum), showing his father’s boat yard just upstream from Flatford Mill, and in 1817 he exhibited Scene on a Navigable River which looks towards Flatford Lock from the south end of the footbridge. Flatford Lock itself was the centrepiece of The Lock exhibited in 1824 and sold at Sotheby’s on 14^th November 1990 (Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection).