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Constable, one of the foremost British landscape painters of the nineteenth century, first achieved success with his large canvases depicting landscape and life in and around the Stour Valley, which he exhibited between 1819 and 1825. Such was the success of the first of these large paintings, The white horse 1819,1 when Constable exhibited it at the Royal Academy in 1819, that he was elected Associate of the Academy later that year.2 Working on a scale usually reserved for history painting, Constable redefined the notion of a ‘finished’ picture by giving his large landscapes something of the spontaneous freedom and expressive handling of a rapidly painted sketch. The leaping horse is the sixth and the last of these large Stour Valley landscapes and one of the most powerful. Constable chose a place called Float Jump, close to where the course of the old river temporarily left the navigable portion of the Stour. It also marked the boundary between the counties of Essex and Suffolk. The jump itself consisted of a wooden barrier a metre high, constructed across the tow path. Built to stop cattle straying, it was low enough to allow barge horses to leap over it. Constable chose the moment when the horse, mounted by a boy, was leaping the barrier, which gave vigour to the scene. He depicted it from a low viewpoint to give the horse and rider a dramatic presence. Constable’s principal concern was not, however, with the specifics of the location but rather capturing the atmosphere of place and the general feelings associated with experiencing nature. He sought to present nature as something mutable, not fixed. ‘It is a lovely subject,’ Constable said of The leaping horse, ‘lively – & soothing – calm and exhilarating, fresh – & blowing’.3 He wanted his landscapes to create a total experience, including a sense of movement and sound as well as what can be directly observed. In this painting he wanted to convey the feel of the wind, the shimmering of light, the sense of being outdoors. And he extended the experience of the landscape by depicting a moorhen startled from her nest by the thundering of the horse’s hoofs. Constable’s handling of paint is expressionist and almost abstract. He used palette knife as well as brush, with which he created a visual impression of flickering lights and shadows. The light rises as if the sun is coming out and the storm clouds are blowing away. It sparkles on the trees on the left and gives the pollarded tree in the centre a silvery look. Constable also carried through his interest in ‘skying’ into all his large landscapes. In saying the sky was the ‘chief organ of sentiment’ in a painting, he emphasised his belief in the expressive importance of the sky, and its ability to dictate the mood of a landscape.4 His skies are a vital part of his compositions and a main conveyor of mood, as in The leaping horse. They transform comfortable, stable scenes into ones of continual change and transition. Anne Gray 1 The Frick Collection, New York. 2 Constable described this work as ‘a placid representation of a serene grey morning, summer’, Graham Reynolds, The later paintings and drawings of John Constable: text, New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1984, p. 156. 3 R.B. Beckett, John Constable’s correspondence VI Ipswich: Suffolk Records Society, 1968, p. 198. 4 Beckett, p. 77.

This was Constable’s last major painting of the Stour Valley, his definitive treatment of a favourite subject, which summed up his personal affection for the place and his lifelong devotion to the example of Claude Lorrain. A relaxing holiday in Suffolk in the autumn of 1827 with his two eldest children had refreshed his associations with the area and may have motivated him to begin painting this work. On 11 June 1828 he wrote to John Fisher that he had ‘Painted a large upright landscape (perhaps my best)’ (Beckett IV, p. 236). Constable depicted the Dedham Vale framed by trees, looking eastwards from Gun Hill, down along the course of the River Stour towards the sea, with the tower of Dedham Church and the village in the middle distance, and Harwich beyond. For this composition he returned to his early painting, Dedham Vale 1802 (Victoria and Albert Museum, London), intensifying the detail of the 1802 study by including the bridge across the river with the Talbooth on the right bank. He added the old stump sprouting new growth in the left foreground as a compositional invention to direct attention to the distant landscape, and as a symbol of regeneration. Constable’s inclusion of the figure of a gypsy mother nursing her child beside a fire has been criticised as a concession to the taste for the Picturesque. Charles Rhyne, however, noted that according to an ordnance survey map a well was located in this area, and that this would have made it a natural camping site for gypsies (C. Rhyne, ‘Constable’s first two six-foot landscapes’, Studies in the History of Art, vol. 24, Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1990, p. 129). Reynolds also noted that gypsies were frequently to be seen in East Anglia and that the inclusion of this detail does not infringe Constable’s rule that only actual or probable figures should appear in his landscape paintings. By including the gypsy mother and child in this painting Constable enlivened the image, with the gypsy’s red cloak providing a contrast to the green of the vegetation. Moreover, Suffolk had been affected by the agricultural depression and social unrest during the 1820s, and the gypsy may reflect the instability of rural life at this time, and Constable’s sympathy with the cause of ordinary people. In his use of a vertical format and in his composition Constable hinted at Claude’s Landscape with Hagar and the Angel 1646, a work he had admired since he first made a copy of it at Sir George Beaumont’s London house around 1800 (Beckett II, p. 24). He saw the way this scene fitted a Claudian pattern and used Claude’s method of suggesting depth through overlapping scenery. In thus paying homage to Claude, Constable also indicated that his own work was worthy of comparison with Claude’s. Leslie Parris and Ian Fleming-Williams have suggested that Beaumont’s gift of Landscape with Hagar and the Angel to the newly opened National Gallery, London, in 1826, and Beaumont’s death in 1827, may have inspired Constable to paint this work as a personal tribute to him and to their shared love of Claude Lorrain (Tate 1976, p. 152). Constable looked at landscape through the art of the past to create his own unique vision. He painted the natural detail of the location in a quite original fashion, using paint brush, palette knife and his fingers to give variety to the application of paint. He used translucent colour to give luminosity to the shadows. He created a sense of the feel of the place – the white-topped clouds suggesting summer sunshine, the flickering leaves indicating wind in the trees, and the light glistening on the ground hinting at rain that has just past. As Timothy Wilcox has observed, ‘the work that had begun in deference to Claude now appears designed to rival him, or even to surpass him’ (Liverpool and Edinburgh 2000, p. 108). The painting was well received at the Royal Academy when Constable exhibited it there in 1828 (as ‘Landscape’). The reviewer for the The Sun provided a narrative reading, observing that ‘A shower has just passed over’, and suggesting that ‘The gleaming water in the distance is inimitable’ (The Sun, 5 May 1828, cit. Ivy 1991, p. 127). Constable subsequently exhibited the painting at the British Institution in 1834 (as ‘The Stour Valley’) when one critic commented: We must consider this picture as one of the best which we remember to have seen from Mr. Constable’s pencil. It is a work of great power both of colour and light and shade, and is executed with considerable freedom and dexterity of execution (The Morning Post, 10 March 1834, cit. Ivy 1991, pp.186–87). More recently Michael Rosenthal has described this work as ‘one of Constable’s greatest paintings’ (Rosenthal 1983, p. 188).

Constable knew this scene well: the Stour Valley from just outside the grounds of Old Hall in East Bergholt, with the churches of Langham and Stratford St Mary villages in the distance. He depicted the ploughmen at work in a manner typical of Suffolk, using a swing plough, which was light and required only a single ploughman and two horses working side by side (rather than a team of four), considered to be an efficient, modern mode of ploughing, contributing to the productivity of the area (Rosenthal 1983, pp. 18–19). And he depicted a ‘summerland’, a field that was ploughed and harrowed in the spring, left fallow over the summer months as part of a two-year crop rotation system, ready for manuring in autumn and sowing in winter (ibid., p. 12). The contemporary farmer or countryman would have appreciated this image of agricultural life of Suffolk (Rosenthal, p. 21). Constable exhibited this first version of the subject at the Royal Academy in 1814 and at the British Institution in 1815, from where it was purchased by John Allnutt, a Clapham wine merchant and collector. As a result of this sale Constable was encouraged to pursue his career as a painter. Beckett has suggested that ‘in Constable’s memory such scenes were gilded with the light of eternal summer and the picture stood for a symbol’ (R.B. Beckett, ‘A Summerland by John Constable’, Art Quarterly, XXVII, summer 1964, p. 176). Constable certainly stressed the poetic aspect of the landscape, linking it to an established literary and pictorial tradition. In the 1814 Royal Academy catalogue, the entry for this work had an accompanying quotation from Robert Bloomfield’s The Farmer’s Boy – a long, 1500-line, four-part poem in heroic couplets composed between 1796–98 and published in 1800. This poem pointed to the solitary nature of the ploughman’s work: But, unassisted through each toilsome day, With smiling brow the Ploughman cleaves his way. In making this reference to poetry Constable implied that the image was not just of a particular place, but also expressed a more general mood and atmosphere, the ‘feel of nature’. Bloomfield was a ‘peasant poet’ of Suffolk, whose work appealed to Constable. He stressed the virtues of honest, hard farming life. Albert Boime has suggested that Bloomfield’s vision of farming life ‘appealed to the gentry, who identified themselves with his nostalgia for a bucolic past and his moralising posture on rural labour’ (A. Boime, Art in an Age of Bonapartism 1800–1815, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990, p. 174). Commentators have questioned whether Constable was sympathetic to the ‘toilsome’ labour of the workers in the field, or whether he had a more conservative view and simply saw them as part of the scene. Certainly, he portrayed this scene from a high vantage point so that the ploughmen seem to merge into the natural elements, small figures within the landscape (Rosenthal 1983, pp. 71–82). In a letter to John Dunthorne senior of 22 February 1814, Constable wrote aboutthis painting: I have added some ploughmen to the landscape from the park pales which is a great help, but I must try and warm the picture a little more if I can. But it will be difficult as ’tis now all of a piece – it is bleak and looks as if there would be a shower of sleet, and that you know is too much the case with my things(Beckett I, p. 101). Constable based this view over the Stour Valley on drawings in his 1813 sketchbook. He also referred to his sketches of ploughmen in this sketchbook. With the inclusion of the figures of the ploughmen he not only added a point of interest but made the scene an agricultural landscape, celebrating country life. This version of A ploughing scene in Suffolk was used as the basis for the mezzotint A summerland engraved by David Lucas .Constable made a second painting of the subject, A ploughing scene in Suffolk (A summerland) c.1824.

Constable first achieved success (and recognition by the Royal Academy) with his large canvases depicting the Stour Valley, which he exhibited between 1819 and 1825. Working on a scale usually reserved for History painting, Constable redefined the notion of a ‘finished’ picture by giving his large paintings something of the spontaneous freedom and expressive handling of a rapidly painted sketch. During the 1820s Constable was repeatedly occupied with the motif of the Lock – it could be regarded as his favourite subject. In 1824 he exhibited the fifth in his series of six large Stour Valley paintings at the Royal Academy, ‘A boat passing a lock’, which he subsequently called The lock (Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection on loan to the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid). It differed from the previous four large canvases in having a vertical format. Constable made at least two other upright versions of the subject in 1824 (Philadelphia Museum and Art Gallery, and private collection). Then, in this painting, he converted the vertical composition into a horizontal one, extending the scene to the right and varying the action. Here a boat with a sail on its way up the River Stour waits at Flatford Lock. The boat is tied to a post while the lock keeper opens the gates to allow it to enter the lock chamber, to be lifted to the higher water level before continuing its journey up river. Constable created an open composition, with Flatford Bridge and a further lock gate and a barge in the background on the right. He depicted a heavy rainstorm on the left, and included a dog in the foreground at the right. The composition was based on two drawings with a horizontal format, Flatford Lock 1823 and Flatford Lock c.1826 . Constable took the rainstorm from an oil sketch of 1819, Branch Hill Pond, Hampstead (Victoria and Albert Museum, London), which herepeated with variations on several occasions, including Branch Hill Pond, Hampstead Heath, with a boy sitting on a bank c.1825–28 . Sarah Cove, who has undertaken a detailed technical examination of this picture, ‘discovered via X-ray that the arms of the lock keeper were originally raised, as in every previous version of the lock keeper’ (Sarah Cove to Anne Lyles, 12 September 2005, NGA file 04/0501–04). The painting was commissioned in 1826 by the Bond Street picture dealer, print and book publisher, James Carpenter. While working on the commission Constable wrote to Carpenter: ‘I have been at the picture ever since I saw you & it is now all over wet – I was at work on it at 7 o clock this morning – and I should have been at it still’. He added: ‘I wish your picture was as good as Claude Lorraine’ (Beckett IV, p. 138). Two years after painting this work Constable borrowed it back from Carpenter and re-worked it. He then exhibited this painting at the British Institution in 1829 under the title ‘Landscape and Lock’. When he was elected a full member of the Royal Academy in 1829 Constable was expected to present a work to the Academy. Such was the value he placed on this painting that he took it back from Carpenter and presented it to the Academy, depositing 100 guineas with a banker until he compensated Carpenter with a work of the same size.

Constable spent the summer and early autumn of 1814 in Suffolk, painting directly from nature. In this work he depicted a panoramic view over the Stour Valley from an elevated position on the road from Flatford to East Bergholt,showing Dedham Church and the village to the left of centre. By including labourers shovelling manure in the foreground Constable created a down-to-earth image of the landscape around his home at East Bergholt – and a realistic record of Suffolk farming practice, emphasising the value of honest rural labour. The men would have cleared the manure from the stockyards in summer and deposited it beside the fields to dry, before manuring the fields in early autumn (I. Fleming-Williams, ‘A runover dungle and a possible date for “Spring”’, Burlington Magazine, vol. 114, June 1972, pp. 386–93). Not long after he painted this work Constable wrote: ‘This charming season … occupies me entirely in the feilds and I beleive I have made some landscapes that are better than is usual with me – at least that is the opinion of all here‘ (Beckett II, p. 131). Constable painted this work as a preparatory study for a painting commissioned by Thomas Fitzhugh as a wedding present for his bride, Philadelphia Godfrey: The Stour Valley and Dedham Church c.1815 (Boston Museum of Fine Arts). Philadelphia was the daughter of the local squire, Peter Godfrey, and the painting was intended as a memento of the view of the valley she knew well and was leaving behind – a view of Dedham Vale from just outside the grounds of her home, Old Hall, East Bergholt.

This impressive painting is beautifully painted with jewel-like precision and shows Constable’s ability to capture the immediate sensations of light and atmosphere; it is one of Constable’s most natural depictions of the landscape around his home, reflecting his interest in portraying rural harmony. It is notable in the way the figures are more conspicuous and more particularised than in his other early landscapes. Although based on a number of sketchbook drawings, the work was probably painted in large part in front of the motif. The field depicted here is the same one seen in the right foreground of the The Stour Valley and Dedham Village 5 September 1814 . Constable depicted a traditional farming community harvesting wheat, with harvesters, gleaners, a boy with a dog and a distant ploughman. The woman and two girls in the foreground are poor, gleaning the ears of wheat missed by the reapers. The boy with the dog is guarding the workers’ food and drink, draped in discarded clothes to provide shade from the sun. Constable presented life before the changes that occurred in rural society with the enclosure of the common fields in 1816 – before the poor had been largely barred from taking part in their age-old practice of gleaning. Constable exhibited this painting at the Royal Academy in 1816 and at the British Institution the following year, when he included with the catalogue entry lines from Robert Bloomfield’s The Farmer’s Boy (1800): Nature herself invites the reapers forth; No rake takes here what heaven to all bestows: Children of want, for you the bounty flows! His inclusion of this text suggests that Constable too believed that the rural poor, in this instance the gleaners, were deserving of nature’s bounty. As Michael Rosenthal has noted, the Napoleonic wars saw an increase in rustic subjects at the main London exhibitions. Around the time Constable painted this scene a number of other British artists were painting similar subjects, such as Peter de Wint’s A cornfield c.1815 (Victoria and Albert Museum, London) and George Robert Lewis’s Harvest field with reapers, Haywood, Herefordshire 1815 (Tate, London). Such farming scenes portrayed the happy Britain, which invasion – or revolution – would have destroyed (Rosenthal 1983, p. 200).