John Constable, R.A.

The work is on the same sheet as lot 117. Again it is mounted on a blue mount. This one has a slight line stain, very near the edge, made by a previous mount. Colours all well preserved as in lot 117 – some grey wash dots in the sky caused, I believe, by a splash from John Constable's brush. If I had to mark this – 9/10.
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This drawing and the previous lot are closely inspired by Old Master paintings, possibly Jacob Ruisdael (the present lot) and possibly Van Goyen or Pieter Molijn (the previous lot). To date, the origins for these works have not been precisely identified, but Constable is known to have drawn copies of Ruisdael (V&A, 258-1888), Albert Cuyp (V&A, 307-1888), and a Swanevelt etching (British Museum, L.B.2.). As well as copies after Claude, Michelangelo, Pisano, Paulus Potter, Teniers, Titian and Paulo Uccello.

Constable greatly admired and respected earlier landscape artists. In June 1833 at his lecture at Hampstead Assembly Rooms, he said, "It was fortunate, therefore, for landscape, destined as it was become so material a feature of the art, that it originated and was in its infancy nursed in the hands of men who were masters of pathos.  As early, I believe, as Cimabue, and certainly Giotto, landscape became impressive."  As Graham Reynolds recognised, "As his lectures show, Constable had unusually detailed knowledge of the history of landscape painting......He intended to portray Nature with the same heightened sensitivity as was to be found in his forerunners.." (i)

Stylistically there are many comparable drawings to the present and the following lot but examination of the following has been particularly illuminating.  At the Victoria & Albert Museum, the View of a Windmill, probably near Brighton (245-1888) reveals the same spare, thin drawing of outlines of clouds. The drawings of Water Lane, Stratford St Mary (241-1888), Flatford Old Bridge and Bridge Cottage (243-1888) and A Barge on the Stour (244-1888) all share the somewhat nervous lines in the foliage with rather unspecific blocks of gray wash quite unrelated to the line drawing.  The wash brushstrokes correspond too to another view of Water Lane, Stratford St Mary (624-1888). We would suggest that this lot and the following lot therefore appear to date from the early 1830s.

(i) Graham Reynolds, Catalogue of the Constable Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum, 1973, p.12