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Lot Essay
Executed in 1801, just two years after Constable had been admitted to the Royal Academy Schools, this painting of Old Hall is believed to be the artist’s first major commission in oil. The patron was John Reade, owner of the manor, and the house stood almost opposite Constable’s father’s house in East Bergholt, Suffolk. On Reade’s death in 1804, Old Hall was acquired by Peter Godfrey and the picture remained in the house, unknown to Constable scholars, for the next 150 years, until its rediscovery by Graham Reynolds in 1956.
The circumstances of the commission were chronicled by the diarist Joseph Farington, who was clearly impressed with the work and keen that his friend secure a fitting payment for his efforts: ‘Constable called on me & I on him to see a picture a view of Mr Reads house near Dedham. It is painted on a coloured ground which he has preserved through the blue of his sky as well as the Clouds ... He desires me to give him my opinion about price & having mentioned 5 guineas I told him he could not ask less than 10 guineas’ (13 July 1801; Farington Diaries, IV, p. 1576).
While working within a well-established tradition of house portraiture in Britain dating back to the seventeenth century, Constable’s innate talents as a landscape painter are clearly evident in this early work, in which he balances his patron’s demands for topographical accuracy with his own concern for capturing the variety and changeability of nature. Note, for example, the care he took to render the different species of tree in the left foreground and the drama he lent to the expanse of sky by introducing storm clouds directly over the house. The technique of painting thinly over a warm colored ground so that it could be seen through in the sky, as noted by Farington, is a practice Constable would continue throughout his career. Indeed, Reynolds commented: ‘in the distance on the left can be seen the slopes of Dedham vale; in the painting here and in the sky can be seen, far more clearly than in his contemporary drawings, the beginnings of Constable’s mature style’ (loc. cit., 1965, p. 137).
Constable would return to painting portraits of specific houses throughout his career, notably Malvern Hall, Warwickshire, in 1809 (Tate Britain, London) and Wivenhoe Park, Essex, in 1816 (National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.), commissioned by Major General Francis Slater-Rebow. However, by the time he came to capture a view of Englefield House in Berkshire for Mr Benyon de Beauvoir in 1833, he had sacrificed attempts at architectural fidelity in favour of rendering the landscape setting to its best effect to the extent that the patron abandoned the commission and Constable ended up describing the work as ‘Picture of a summer morning, including a house’ at the Royal Academy exhibition that year.
The circumstances of the commission were chronicled by the diarist Joseph Farington, who was clearly impressed with the work and keen that his friend secure a fitting payment for his efforts: ‘Constable called on me & I on him to see a picture a view of Mr Reads house near Dedham. It is painted on a coloured ground which he has preserved through the blue of his sky as well as the Clouds ... He desires me to give him my opinion about price & having mentioned 5 guineas I told him he could not ask less than 10 guineas’ (13 July 1801; Farington Diaries, IV, p. 1576).
While working within a well-established tradition of house portraiture in Britain dating back to the seventeenth century, Constable’s innate talents as a landscape painter are clearly evident in this early work, in which he balances his patron’s demands for topographical accuracy with his own concern for capturing the variety and changeability of nature. Note, for example, the care he took to render the different species of tree in the left foreground and the drama he lent to the expanse of sky by introducing storm clouds directly over the house. The technique of painting thinly over a warm colored ground so that it could be seen through in the sky, as noted by Farington, is a practice Constable would continue throughout his career. Indeed, Reynolds commented: ‘in the distance on the left can be seen the slopes of Dedham vale; in the painting here and in the sky can be seen, far more clearly than in his contemporary drawings, the beginnings of Constable’s mature style’ (loc. cit., 1965, p. 137).
Constable would return to painting portraits of specific houses throughout his career, notably Malvern Hall, Warwickshire, in 1809 (Tate Britain, London) and Wivenhoe Park, Essex, in 1816 (National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.), commissioned by Major General Francis Slater-Rebow. However, by the time he came to capture a view of Englefield House in Berkshire for Mr Benyon de Beauvoir in 1833, he had sacrificed attempts at architectural fidelity in favour of rendering the landscape setting to its best effect to the extent that the patron abandoned the commission and Constable ended up describing the work as ‘Picture of a summer morning, including a house’ at the Royal Academy exhibition that year.