JOHN CONSTABLE
East Bergholt 1776 - 1837 London
Ref: CC 198
The gravel pits at Hampstead
Oil on paper laid down on board: 7 x 10 ¼ in / 17.8 x 26 cm
Inscribed on the reverse of the board: This sketch on paper formerly the property / of Captain C. Constable, son of John Constable / was mounted on this card by Dowdeswell the / picture dealer
Frame size: 12 ½ x 15 ½ in / 31.8 x 39.4 cm
Painted circa 1820-23
Provenance:
Captain Charles Golding Constable, the artist’s son (1821-1878);
probably his posthumous sale, Christie’s London, 11th July 1887 (lot 70 Sketch of Hampstead Heath, 1821 or lot 74 Hampstead Heath, 1823, each sold for £20 gns to Dowdeswell & Dowdeswell);
Dowdeswell & Dowdeswell, London (inscription on the reverse of the board)
Arthur Morrison (1863-1945), journalist and collector;
Percy Moore Turner (1877-1950), dealer and collector;
his posthumous sale, Sotheby’s London, 12th December 1951, lot 6 (as Gravel pits at Hampstead; £32 to Mallett);
Ben McPeake, Managing Director of the Hearst family’s National Magazines, c.1951;
by descent in a private collection, UK
This striking and vigorously painted oil sketch, showing workmen quarrying gravel on the heath at Hampstead, only emerged onto the open market in 2024, being previously unrecorded in the extensive published Constable literature. A fascinating new discovery, its provenance can be traced back to the collection of John Constable’s son, Charles Golding Constable.
As is well known, John Constable was born in Suffolk, in the village of East Bergholt close to the border with Essex. For the first half of his career, he mainly concentrated on painting views in this area - of the village itself, of his father’s mill at nearby Flatford or of the magnificent vistas across Dedham Vale. After his marriage to Maria Bicknell in 1816, when he moved permanently to London, his subject-matter then expanded to include paintings of other locations which he visited in connection either with family circumstances or seeing friends. Hampstead was one of these new locations together with Salisbury and Brighton.
It was in the summer of 1819 that Constable first rented lodgings in Hampstead – at that date just a village - a few miles to the north of central London. He was concerned for the health of his wife and young children, and in Hampstead he knew they would benefit from the cleaner air. He was to continue to take lodgings in Hampstead most subsequent summers until, in 1827, he took a lease on a house in Well Walk . Most of these lodgings offered easy access to the extensive Heath, where Constable began to make numerous oil sketches in the open air, whether of views on the heath itself, or – in 1821 and 1822 – of its dynamic, blustery skies.
In the early nineteenth century, the heath at Hampstead was still relatively rustic and unkempt. Its surface was punctuated with numerous steep banks and hollows caused by centuries of sand-digging. Almost as soon as he first arrived in Hampstead in 1819, Constable started making sketches of workmen digging up sand and gravel on the heath, as witnessed by the many pencil sketches he made in a small sketchbook used that year (British Museum; Reynolds 19.28). The workmen perhaps reminded him of the agricultural labourers he had observed in his native Suffolk, manipulating their carts over dung heaps or driving them through the shallow waters at Flatford at the time of the hay harvest. Moreover, just as Constable had included such working figures in his earlier exhibited Suffolk landscapes, so also he included similar working figures digging sand in his exhibited Hampstead pictures. For example, the latter feature in the foreground and middle distance of a painting, Hampstead Heath, c.1820-22, in the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge (fig. 1), as well as in later Hampstead subjects of the view over Branch Hill Pond.
Fig.1 John Constable, Hampstead Heath, c.1820-22, oil on canvas, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
If it were not for the traditional title of this sketch, identifying it as a view of the Gravel Pits at Hampstead, the fact that Constable shows water in the foreground might have suggested it rather represents a view on a river, perhaps even on the River Stour in Suffolk. However the traditional title for the sketch is surely correct, and perhaps indeed taken from an old inscription made by Constable on the back of the sketch before it was laid down onto board. Indeed, around the early 1820s Constable made a pencil sketch, similarly thought to show a view in Hampstead, of a comparable scene looking up and over uneven ground, with the roof and gable end of a house in the far left-hand distance. (fig. 2). The water shown in the foreground of the oil sketch can probably be explained as representing one of the ponds on the heath which often formed (from shallow depressions) after heavy rain. Painted on paper, the sketch was almost certainly made by Constable in the open air, and indeed carries pin holes in the corners implying that he probably pinned the sketch to a board whilst painting it. The sketch also carries evenly placed pencil marks at the lower edge which may well indicate that Constable was planning to work up a larger version of the composition, perhaps one he even intended to exhibit, by placing ‘squaring threads’ on those marks.
Fig. 2 John Constable, A group of trees on broken ground, probably at Hampstead, pencil and grey wash on paper, Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Landscapes by professional painters featuring substantial figures of labourers are relatively rare in Britain in this period. However, a decade earlier one of Constable’s contemporaries, John Linnell, painted a rather stark view of prominent workmen labouring in some other gravel pits on the edge of London, Kensington Gravel Pits, c.1811-12 (fig. 3). Linnell exhibited this painting at the British Institution in London in 1813, and so Constable would almost certainly have seen it, as he too exhibited a landscape at that venue that very year. Linnell was actually living in that area, known as Kensington Gravel Pits, when he painted the picture, sharing lodgings at the time with fellow artist William Mulready, who similarly painted some views of the Gravel Pits. Moreover, a few years before, Mulready had made an unusual oil sketch on Hampstead Heath , 1806 (fig. 4) which makes a particularly interesting comparison with Constable’s sketch of roughly fifteen years later. For, like Constable in his sketch, Mulready shows one of the heath’s gravel pits from a low viewpoint. The covered cart he depicts on the horizon is presumably carrying the gravel away.
Fig. 3 John Linnell, Kensington Gravel Pits, oil on canvas, Tate
Fig.4 William Mulready, Hampstead Heath, 1806, oil on millboard, Victoria & Albert Museum
John Constable’s sketch of The Gravel Pits at Hampstead, as has already been noted, is traceable back to the collection of his son Charles Golding. It subsequently passed through the hands of a number of renowned collectors: Arthur Morrison; Percy Moore Turner; and later Ben McPeake who, living as he did at Frognal House in Hampstead, probably acquired the sketch for its local interest.
Anne Lyles
6 March 2025
JOHN CONSTABLE
East Bergholt, Suffolk 1776 – 1837 London
John Constable, with Turner, is the most important British landscape painter of the nineteenth century, revered for his ‘naturalism’ while Turner’s landscapes suggest grandeur and generalisation. Unlike Turner, Constable did not roam far abroad on picturesque tours, instead creating his art from familiar, much-loved scenery.
John Constable, the son of a prosperous miller, was born in East Bergholt, Suffolk in 1776. In 1799 he attended the Royal Academy Schools and had informal tuition from the landscape artist Joseph Farington, as well as copying Old Masters. Constable returned to Bergholt and first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1802, surviving on family money and a modest portrait practice. In 1806 he toured the Lake District, making watercolours of the ‘sublime’ scenery.
‘Truth to nature’ was Constable’s credo; from 1808 he made oil sketches from nature as well as pencil drawings of parts of his compositions. These were then used as aide-memoires for an exhibition piece painted in the studio, such as Flatford lock and mill (RA 1812), a view of his father’s mill. In 1811 Constable visited Salisbury at the Bishop’s invitation and formed a lifelong friendship with the Bishop’s nephew the Rev. John Fisher. He returned to Salisbury throughout his life, painting some of his finest, most moving pictures of the Cathedral in sunshine, showers and overarched by a rainbow. Like the productive fields of the Stour valley where he grew up, the Cathedral represented for the deeply conservative Constable the core values of England which must be preserved in a changing, often threatening world.
In 1809 Constable had fallen in love with Maria Bicknell, granddaughter of the Rector of East Bergholt, but they were not able to marry until 1816, because her family (quite correctly) doubted Constable’s ability to support a wife. That year Constable moved permanently to London and began to produce more ambitious paintings such as Whitehall Stairs, June 18th 1817 (the opening of Waterloo Bridge) (1817; exhibited 1832; Tate Gallery, London) and the ‘six-footer’ Stour view The white horse (Frick Collection, New York) which was shown to critical acclaim at the Royal Academy in 1819.
That same year Constable became an Associate of the Royal Academy. Seeking fresh air for his consumptive wife, he rented a house at Hampstead and from circa 1820-22 produced a series of brilliant oil studies of skies, noting times of day and weather conditions. From 1824 family holidays in Brighton inspired oils and watercolours of panoramic coast scenes full of light and air.
In 1824 Constable sold The haywain (RA 1821; National Gallery, London) to the Parisian dealer John Arrowsmith. The painting won a gold medal in the Paris Salon and Constable’s naturalistic approach to landscape and free, expressive brushwork was highly influential on French painters such as Delacroix and Huet. In 1828 Maria Constable died; the following year her devastated husband was elected RA and remarked bitterly that there was now no beloved wife to make the honour sweet. Constable’s bleakness is reflected in stormy, expressionistic paintings like Hadleigh castle, 1828-9 (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut), where the ruin symbolises himself.
In 1830 Constable supervised John Lucas’s mezzotints after his paintings, English landscape. Constable increasingly saw landscape in terms of chiaroscuro – composition unified by light and shade – and was less interested in individual elements, symbolism, or ‘historical motifs’ in his painting. Like Turner, though with a totally different approach, he believed passionately in the importance of landscape painting within the heirarchy of artistic genres. Landscape painting was not inferior, but was a paramount expression of a nation’s genius. Constable was an excellent, dedicated teacher at the Royal Academy Schools and lectured on the history of landscape painting. A touchy, affectionate and utterly sincere man, he died in London on 31st March 1837.
The work of John Constable is represented in the National Gallery, London; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Tate Gallery, London; the National Gallery, Washington DC and the Louvre, Paris.
