Portrait of Henry Greswold Lewis (1754-1829), half-length, in a brown fur-lined coat, with a draped red curtain and landscape beyond

Henry Greswold Lewis was one of Constable’s earliest and more eccentric patrons. The sitter and artist first met in 1807 through Lewis’s brother-in-law, Wilbraham Tollemache, 6th Earl of Dysart, and remained friends for over twenty years. Lewis commissioned this portrait shortly after they met but it was probably not completed before 1809, the year Constable travelled to Lewis’s home, Malvern Hall. This is the first version Constable painted of the portrait, which was evidently deemed a success as at least three others were painted for members of the sitter’s family over the next decades, including for his brother-in-law, Orlando Bridgeman, 1^st Earl of Bradford (1809; Weston Park, Staffordshire); his cousin, Jane Harries (1813; for Knowle Hall, Warwickshire) and his former ward, Mary Freer (1824).

As well as portraits of Freer and views of Malvern Hall, Constable completed several unusual commissions for Lewis. These included a miniature of Mary Freer’s eye intended for a shirt pin, a nine-foot portrait of his ancestor Humphri de Grouswolde for the staircase at Malvern Hall in 1818, and a design for the pub sign of the Old Mermaid & Greswolde Armes Inn in Solihull, which Lewis owned. That Constable was prepared to carry out such commissions is testimony to their friendship.