A Cottage in a Cornfield

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A Cottage in a Cornfield: John Constable

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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John Constable Oil Painting - A Cottage in a Cornfield

Keywords: Cottage, Cornfield

Work Overview: A Cottage in a Cornfield
John Constable
Date: 1817
Style: Romanticism
Genre: landscape
Media: oil, canvas
Dimensions: 26.3 x 31.5 cm

Constable studied at the Royal Academy Schools and developed a remarkably spontaneous technique. Together with J.M.W.Turner, he was a key figure in British landscape painting. This small but intense picture of a cottage near the artist's birthplace of East Bergholt in Suffolk derives from a sketch of 1815. Exhibited at the Royal Academy and the British Institution in 1817-1818, Constable sold it to W.Venables, later Lord Mayor of London, for 20 guineas in 1818.

Though left unfinished until March 1833, Constable based the donkey in this painting on a life study done in December 1815. The corn in the field remains green on the side shaded from the sun, but is ripe elsewhere, suggesting it is set in the month of July.

As a boy Constable often passed by this cottage, at the end of Fen Lane, when he walked down the lane on his way to school at Dedham. The cottage belonged to Peter Godfrey of Old Hall, East Bergholt, and one of his workmen probably lived in it. It had been demolished by 1885 (St John 2002, p. 29).

Constable made two versions of this subject, the first painted largely outdoors in the vicinity of East Bergholtduring the summer of 1815 and completed in 1833(Victoria and Albert Museum, London), and this second version painted in his studio in London towards the end of 1816 or the beginning of 1817. He made a number of changes to the image, showing the scene at high summer with the field full of ripe corn, changing the quality of the light, adding the figure beside the cottage on the left, and the donkey and foal standing to the right of the gate. He probably relied on the drawing he had made of this subject around 1815 . As Ian Fleming-Williams and Leslie Parris have shown, the most marked difference between the painting of 1815/1833and this work is the way in which Constable painted the trees on the right. In this painting he appears to have based his trees on those in Martino Rota’s engraving after Titian’s Martyrdom of St Peter Martyr (destroyed), a work Constable greatly admired (Fleming-Williams and Parris 1984, pp. 138–41). Thus, even during a period when he was working close to nature, Constable combined different elements in his paintings in order to improve his composition.

In his biography of Constable, Andrew Shirley perceptively remarked that it was ‘a picture compact with the true sentiment of observation, playing the contrast of the remoteness of human habitation against the thick, ripening, jungle life of the corn surging up to the walls of the cottage’ (Shirley 1949, p. 105).

There is another larger version of this work in the Victoria and Albert Museum, dating from the same period but retouched and shown at the Royal Academy in 1833. When the V&A work was exhibited at the Tate in 1976, the catalogue entry drew attention to this missing version, thus leading to its re-discovery.

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John Constable

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