This is another newly discovered painting by Constable. It is modestly sized, with an upright format, and shows how at this period Constable returned to a smaller dimension for exhibition works in order to improve his ‘finish’ and detailing. The feathery foliage of the black poplar trees on the far right suggests he had followed his contemporary Joseph Farington’s recent advice to study Claude Lorrain.

What looks like a square well-head with a bell on a chain in the bottom left corner may be connected with a self-levelling system for locks.

This is one of a pair of pictures commissioned from Constable by Major-General Francis Slater-Rebow, the owner of the house. It seems to have been executed mainly out of doors and would have been the largest plein air work painted by the artist to date. In order to include all the details the Major-General required, Constable added strips of canvas to either side of the canvas as he worked.

This quite recently discovered pencil tracing, probably made in the summer of 1816, shows the two barges as they are to be found in Constable’s finished painting of this view (below).

It was made by tracing with brush and ink onto a sheet of glass attached to the top of his easel. Following a technique described by Leonardo da Vinci, he attached strings to the four corners of the glass and held them in his mouth to bring the centre of the glass perpendicular to his eye. After drawing the view he then laid a sheet of paper on the glass and traced over the image.

This painting, the fore-runner of Constable’s great six-foot Stour scenes, shows a view of his father’s mill at Flatford. Corn ground here was taken by barges along the canalised Stour to nearby Mistley and then sent on to London by ship. Returning barges would bring coal and other cargoes.

The related drawing (above) was transferred to the canvas by a grid method which allowed accurate scaling up. (For more explanation of Constable’s scaling-up technique, see the interactive screen in the final room of the exhibition). Much of the painting was undertaken out of doors.

Constable married Maria Bicknell in October 1816. In the summer of 1817 while awaiting the birth of the first of seven children, the couple stayed in East Bergholt. This was the last of his long stays in Suffolk as London became the permanent focus of his artistic career. He produced a considerable body of work during this summer.

This view is of the lane Constable walked along to get to school at Dedham as a boy. The church tower is not in reality visible from this exact viewpoint.

This plein air study provided Constable with a ready-made format for the finished work of the same title now in the National Gallery, London. This latter picture was painted nearly ten years later, in 1826, when Constable stopped work on a painting of Waterloo Bridge and was looking hurriedly for a subject to exhibit at the Royal Academy that summer. The view is of Fen Lane, a favourite site with personal overtones for Constable (as seen above).

Dedham Mill, further upstream from Flatford, was also owned by Constable’s father. This drawing was made on a page of a sketchbook and follows a view abandoned the previous summer (1816) due to very poor weather.

Like many unfinished oil sketches of this period, this work combines an overall breadth of treatment with areas of detailed finish. Much of the foreground is dominated only by primed canvas. It may have been made in 1816 and abandoned due to bad weather, or in 1817.

It seems to have been used as a near same-size study for the version of this subject he painted for exhibition in 1818 (below), perhaps inspiring his later practice of using full-scale sketches for his ‘six-footers’.

This is the prime version of a series of images Constable made of Dedham Mill. It is almost certainly the work he exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1818 as Landscape: Breaking up of a shower. Constable worked on this over the winter of 1817-18.

After his marriage to Maria Bicknell in 1816, Constable settled permanently in London where he rented houses in Bloomsbury and Hampstead. This painting shows Maria, probably with their eldest son John Charles and one of their daughters, ‘Minna’.

It is painted on the back of a panel used to copy a work attributed to the Dutch painter David Teniers the Younger, owned by Constable’s supporter Sir George Beaumont. As the painting suggests, Constable, like his wife, was an affectionate and devoted parent.

This plein air view looks westwards towards Harrow-on-the-Hill.

Every summer between 1819 and 1826, except in 1824, Constable took a house in Hampstead with his family. In 1827 he settled there permanently, keeping a studio in the West End. As he told his friend John Fisher, the arrangement allowed him to ‘unite a town and country life’.

During Constable’s lifetime Hampstead Heath was a working landscape with sanddiggers and grazing cattle. In 1821 and 1822 Constable painted about a hundred oil sketches of skies over Hampstead. These proved invaluable in the development of his ‘six-footers’ during the 1820s.