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Lot Essay
This picture showing a Moonlight landscape with Hadleigh Church, signed and dated 1796 on the reverse of the original canvas (now covered by the relining), constitutes Constable's earliest dated picture. Executed in the year Constable went to stay with his uncle Thomas Allen in Edmonton, North London - where he met and befriended the artists John Cranch (1751-1821) and John Thomas Smith (1766-1833) - the picture reveals a remarkable range of influences. In a letter dated 9 November 1796, Constable wrote to Smith that he had ‘lately painted a small moonlight in the manner or style of Cranch’ (Beckett, op. cit.). While there is some scholarly disagreement as to whether the picture described in the letter refers to the present canvas, there is no question that the overarching compositional source was Rubens’s Landscape by Moonlight (1635-40; London, The Courtauld Gallery), a work once owned by Sir Joshua Reynolds and sold at Christie’s, on 7 April 1796, very probably to the dealer and art historian Michael Bryan (1757-1821). Graham Reynolds speculated that Constable saw Rubens’s picture shortly after it entered Bryan’s collection and noted that the artist was thought to have a made a copy of it (Reynolds, op. cit.). C.R. Leslie, Constable's friend and biographer, recalled how the artist had a print of Rubens's composition near the foot of his bed (Life and Letters, John Constable, R.A., London, 1896, p. 330).
Although Rubens's picture was evidently the principal source of inspiration for this early work, Constable also drew on motifs from more contemporary painters; details such as the figures around the campfire on the right of the composition can be compared with similar vignettes in the nocturne scenes of John Cranch and with the early landscapes of Thomas Gainsborough, notably Landscape with Gipsies (c.1753-54; London, Tate Britain). As Graham Reynolds observed (op. cit.), a similar group of gipsies is seen in The Vale of Dedham, a picture exhibited by Constable in 1828 (Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery). The donkey, whose silhouette is cast against the moonlit river, also recalls Gainsborough’s landscapes from the 1750s. Mark Evans has noted that the original idea for Constable’s composition was a textural source: Leonardo’s A Treatise on Painting, which the artist took ‘great pleasure in reading’ in October 1796 (M. Evans, op. cit., p. 19).
Although Rubens's picture was evidently the principal source of inspiration for this early work, Constable also drew on motifs from more contemporary painters; details such as the figures around the campfire on the right of the composition can be compared with similar vignettes in the nocturne scenes of John Cranch and with the early landscapes of Thomas Gainsborough, notably Landscape with Gipsies (c.1753-54; London, Tate Britain). As Graham Reynolds observed (op. cit.), a similar group of gipsies is seen in The Vale of Dedham, a picture exhibited by Constable in 1828 (Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery). The donkey, whose silhouette is cast against the moonlit river, also recalls Gainsborough’s landscapes from the 1750s. Mark Evans has noted that the original idea for Constable’s composition was a textural source: Leonardo’s A Treatise on Painting, which the artist took ‘great pleasure in reading’ in October 1796 (M. Evans, op. cit., p. 19).