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THE PROPERTY OF A GENTLEMAN

FLATFORD MILL FROM THE TOW PATH

measurements note
23 by 18 cm., 9 by 7¼ in.

oil on canvas

PROVENANCE

Probably Isabel Constable, the artist's daughter, her sale, Christie's, 17th June 11872, lot 247, bt. Dowdeswell for £29.8.0;
Sotheby's sale, 31st March 1999, lot 30, bt. by the present owner

EXHIBITED

Dowdeswell Galleries, A Collection of Early British Paintings in Oil, 1892, no.48

NOTE

This fine oil sketch, last exhibited in 1892, shows the towpath at Flatford Bridge with Flatford Mill in the distance. On the left is the end of Flatford Old Bridge which took the path from East Bergholt to Flatford over the river. It probably dates from 1813 and is one of the earliest sketches for one of Constable's most celebrated pictures, Scene on a Navigable River (Flatford Mill) (Tate Gallery) which the artist exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1817.

Flatford Mill was the focal point for the flourishing business run by Golding Constable, the artist's father. He had inherited the tenancy of the mill from an uncle in the 1760's and by the date of this sketch the family's business was very prosperous, helped to some extent by Napoleon's continental blockade which meant that Britain had to depend on its own food supplies. Barges took corn ground at the mill down the river Stour to the port of Mistley from where it was shipped to London. Barges returning up the river would bring with them other cargoes such as coal. In the finished picture a pair of barges are shown travelling upstream having just passed through Flatford Lock and shortly to be poled under the footbridge.

It is not surprising that Flatford Mill was central to Constable's first coherent group of river Stour paintings. It was an area which offered him endless scope for variety including as it did a combination of mill buildings, water, trees and lock gates. From 1810 he did a series of sketches showing a much closer view of the mill, and these culminated in Flatford Mill from the Lock (David Thomson) which he exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1812. In 1813 he left London to sketch at East Bergholt, and his sketchbook from this period has seventy-two pages of drawings dating from 10th July to 22nd October. Many of these provide motifs for his later finished pictures. The drawing on page ten of this sketchbook is taken from an identical viewpoint to that shown in the present sketch, and both relate closely to an oil sketch of similar size formerly belonging to C.R. Leslie which was sold in these rooms on 13th March 1985 (Graham Reynolds, The Earlier Paintings and Drawings of John Constable, 1996, no. 14.55). These early studies, together with drawings from the 1814 sketchbook and an upright oil sketch in a private collection (Reynolds op. art no. 16.101) show that the artist was examining various different viewpoints before finally settling on the finished composition. The present sketch includes several features not present in the final work, notably a large branch in the foremost black poplar tree which later disappeared and the introduction of two figures in the foreground.

We are grateful to Graham Reynolds for his assistance in cataloguing this painting.