‘When I sit down to make a sketch from nature, the first thing I try to do is to forget that I have ever seen a picture… In a sketch, there is nothing but the one state of mind – that which you were in at the time.’ (John Constable to C.R Leslie, Memoirs Of The Life Of John Constable, Esq. R.A. Composed Chiefly Of His Letters, London, 1843).

The oil sketches produced by John Constable in the open air are recognised as having a major impact on many major European artists of the nineteenth century, including Eugene Delacroix, the Barbizon school of artists and even the French Impressionists, who were inspired by Constable’s direct response to nature.

Dated 1 October 1812, this small, wonderfully freely painted en plein air sketch shows the tenant farmer Willy Lott’s whitewashed cottage on the banks of the River Stour, a key subject that would later feature in two of Constable’s most iconic works, The White Horse (The Frick Collection, New York) and The Hay-Wain (The National Gallery, London). Constable executed a small number of studies of the cottage from different vantage points during sketching tours in Suffolk in 1811 and 1812, of which this is the only example to remain in private hands. It is also one of the earliest instances of a rainbow featuring in Constable’s work, a motif that he would use to great effect in his later paintings.

Constable’s devotion to his native Suffolk landscape never waned and it provided the most consistent and potent source of artistic inspiration throughout his career. Writing to his great friend and mentor John Fisher, Bishop of Salisbury, on 23 October 1821, Constable declared: ‘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’ (cited in R.B. Beckett ed., John Constable’s Correspondence, Suffolk, 1968, VI, p. 78). The subject of this sketch was certainly close to Constable’s heart, since Willy Lott’s cottage could be viewed from Flatford Mill, which was his father’s first home and where his oldest sister and brother were born. Constable executed a painting of Willy Lott’s cottage from across the river as early as 1802 (Private Collection), however, he only began to really explore the subject in 1811 and 1812, from which point it became one of the definitive motifs in his art, as the subject of, or setting for, two important early works, The Mill Stream (circa 1814; Ipswich Museums and Galleries, Ipswich) and The Ferry (1814; Private Collection), and his two later masterpieces, The White Horse (1819) and The Hay-Wain (1821).

The other surviving oil sketches from 1811 and 1812 showing Willy Lott’s cottage from various different angles are all preserved in museums: a similarly small (24.1 x 18.1 cm.), double-sided oil sketch on paper in vertical format, corresponding fairly closely with the left-hand side of The Hay-Wain, is in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (the reverse capturing the same view from slightly further back); a slightly larger (20.8 x 29.2 cm.), horizontal format oil study on board, showing Willy Lott’s cottage from the forecourt of Flatford mill, incorporating the south bank of the river, which probably provided the inspiration for the Ipswich The Mill Stream, is in Tate Britain, London (fig. 2); and a second vertical format oil sketch (24.5 x 21.1 cm.) of circa 1812-13 with Willy Lott’s cottage viewed from the south bank of the Stour, which Leslie Parris and Ian Fleming-Williams considered to be the immediate forerunner to Constable’s The Ferry (Constable, exhibition catalogue, London, 1991, p. 141, no. 64), is also in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Constable returned to the subject again in 1816, executing a horizontal format sketch in which he expanded the scene to the left to include most of the cottage (Ipswich Museums and Galleries).

In the present sketch, the cottage is viewed from the parapet on the mill stream side of Flatford Mill, from an angle not precisely repeated in any other known work. This is also the only image that shows the building anchored on the right rather than the left of the composition. It is the only sketch of the cottage from the years 1811 to 1812 that is dated (upper right) and is the second earliest known depiction in oil of a rainbow, the first being the sketch Landscape with a double rainbow dated 28 July 1812 (Victoria and Albert Museum, London). The inclusion of the bull, so brilliantly rendered with a few expert strokes, shows Constable experimenting with different foreground motifs; other sketches incorporate horses and dogs.

Anne Lyles describes Constable’s en plein air sketches from this period as private works: ‘on one level simply emotional responses in paint to the beauty he saw around him in the natural world, a beauty which sometimes elicited from him a powerful sense of reverence and divine wonder’, however, she also points out that they had a practical function in educating and instructing the eye, and serving as a potential repertoire of motifs for further consultation or elaboration in the studio (Constable’s Oil Sketches 1809-1829: The Maria Bicknell Years, exhibition catalogue, New York, 2007, p. 45).

Constable does not appear to have worked this exact composition up in to a finished painting, however he retained the sketch in his studio and on his death in 1837 it was inherited by his daughter Isabel Constable. Isabel bequeathed a large part of the family collection of oil sketches to the Victoria and Albert Museum, but she chose to gift this particular sketch to her friend Alice Fenwick, née Ashby. Alice’s father, Harry Pollard Ashby, was himself a landscape painter, exhibiting at the Royal Academy between 1835 and 1865, and had known Constable in the latter’s final years. Hugh Constable, John’s grandson, remembered Ashby telling him in 1884 that he had painted with Constable on occasion. Alice Fenwick was probably given the sketch by Isabel in the 1880s, and it remained unknown outside the family, descending to her daughter Dora Harriet Maffett and to the latter’s son, Major C.W. Maffett, who died in 1982, when it was offered for sale at Christie's, London.

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