John Constable, R.A.

Miss Isabel Constable, the artist’s daughter;

Her sale (unidentified);

With Leggatt, circa 1899 (according to a label on the reverse);

W.G. Saunders, Esq.;

By whom sold (‘The Property of W. G. Saunders, Esq.’), London, Sotheby’s, 20 March 1974, lot 25, for £4,200, to Agnew;

With Thomas Agnew & Sons, London (stock no. 39467);

From whom acquired by the present owners. 

London, Tate Gallery, Constable, 13 June – 15 September 1991, no. 29.

R. Hoozee, L'opera completa di Constable, Milan 1979, p. 96, no. 100, reproduced;

L. Parris and I. Fleming-Williams, Constable, exh. cat., London 1991, p. 95, no. 29, reproduced in colour;

G. Reynolds, The Early Paintings and Drawings of John Constable, New Haven and London 1996, text vol., p. 149, no. 10.27, plates vol., reproduced in colour, pl. 851.

This lively and idiosyncratic little oil sketch belongs to a group of such small-scale studies of his local parish church that Constable executed en plein air, traditionally dated to circa 1809–10. Partly surrounded by trees and lacking a tower, it is not a conspicuous feature of the local landscape in the way that Dedham or Stoke-by-Nayland churches are, both of which feature so prominently on the distant horizons of many of his Dedham Valley scenes. Nevertheless, Constable made many drawings and watercolours of the building in his early years, as well as this series of oil studies, and the church and its courtyard provided him with the subject for one of his earliest exhibited canvases, which he showed at the Academy in 1810 (fig. 1).¹ He would also return to develop the allusions made in this work in the 1830s when designing illustrations for Gray’s celebrated Elegy written in a Country Churchyard – a project commissioned by the bibliographer John Martin. A drawing related to this sketch is in the Witt Collection at the Courtauld Institute (fig. 2);² and further related oil studies include those in the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and the Yale Centre for British Art, New Haven.³ 

The Church of St. Mary the Virgin, in East Bergholt, Suffolk, held a particular significance for Constable. He was born and brought up in the village and was baptised in St. Mary’s in 1776, as were his siblings. His father, Golding Constable, served as the church warden, and his future grandfather-in-law, the Rev. Dr Durand Rhudde, was the Rector. The church, which dates back to 1350, is well-known for the absence of a tower or spire to house its bells. Work had begun on such a tower in 1525, under the patronage of Cardinal Wolsey. However, his fall from grace in 1530 brought construction to a halt and the following year a wooden bell cage was erected in the churchyard. Originally intended as a temporary structure until the tower could be completed, it still exists today, housing the church’s set of 5 bells which are rung by hand from the ground – a feature unique in English campanology.

Constable’s study shows part of the unfinished tower on the left, the window at the west end of the south aisle and the south porch beyond, with their distinctive exterior buttressing. The church is built partly of flint and partly of brick, with materials salvaged from an earlier building, and the artist has deftly captured the mottled, uneven surface of its façade. A soft light picks out the warm pinks, greens and blues of the opposing materials, whilst the architectural features are sketched in with characteristically swift, assured strokes of the brush. It was just such rustic, time-soaked structures that had inspired Constable to become an artist in the first place. As he put it himself to his friend John Fisher, ‘old rotten banks, slimy posts, & brickwork, I love such things... As long as I do paint I shall never cease to paint such places. They have always been my delight’.⁴

The bent figure of a man, dressed in black, leaning heavily on a stick, draws direct allusions to the poet Gray’s famous Elegy, adding a note of melancholy and imbuing the work with a sense of elegiac musing which elevates it above the level of an architectural study. Around 1806 Constable had made a drawing in which a man leaning on a stick by a tombstone in East Bergholt Church addresses two ladies, one of whom kneels before a tombstone on which the opening lines of the ‘Epitaph’ to Gray’s Elegy are inscribed. In the exhibited 1810 painting, for which this work has been seen as a related study, Constable dispensed with the more obvious imagery of this tradition by grouping the figures – which consist of a clergyman addressing two others – more causally with their backs to the tomb. A ray of sunlight, however, draws the viewers’ attention to the sundial marking off time on the façade of the church porch. Only local observers of Constable’s painting at the Academy would have known that the Latin motto on the dial read ‘Ut umbra sic vita’ (‘Life is like a shadow’), a proverb that Constable later used on the closing ‘Vignette’ of his English Landscape mezzotints, published in 1832.  

¹ The Church Porch, East Bergholt, 1810; Tate, London, inv. no. N01245.

² Reynolds 1996, no. 12.48.

³ London, Victoria & Albert Museum, inv. no. 138-1888; and New Haven, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, inv. no. B2001.2.237.

⁴ John Constable's Discourses, R.B. Beckett (ed.), Ipswich 1978, pp. 12–13.