A cloud study

Lionel Bicknell Constable was the seventh and last child of John Constable and his wife Maria. He was born in Hampstead in 1828 and, like his father, specialized in landscape painting. Leslie Parris and Ian Fleming-Williams' 1978 article highlights the closeness of the father and son's works, identifying a number of paintings whose attributions were confused, likely because Lionel often painted the same locations as his father (see 'Which Constable?', The Burlington Magazine, September 1978, pp. 566-578). The present cloud sketch does not particularly resemble the elder Constable's works in palette or technique; rather, it bears a much closer similarity to Lionel's cloud pictures. One example, now in the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven (inv. no. B1981.25.153) utilizes a similar chalky blue pigment and the paint is applied with comparably rapid, sweeping strokes. Later in life, Lionel turned away from painting in favor of photography, occasionally capturing the same landscapes his father had painted.