Barges on the River Stour at Flatford, Suffolk
John Constable (1776-1837).
Watercolor over pencil on laid paper.
8 x 13 inches sheet, 19 1/2 x 24 1/2 inches framed.
Provenance: by descent to Captain Charles Golding Constable (1821-1878); either Herbert William Fisher or
his son Admiral Sir William Wordsworth Fisher (1875-1937); His daughter, Rosamund, wife of 4th Baron Coleridge;
thence by descent; Sotheby’s, British Watercolors, June 6, 2007. This drawing descended in the Constable family, passing to the Fisher family possibly in the second half of the 19th century. It then came to the Coleridge collection as a result of the marriage between Cecilia Rosamund Fisher and Richard Duke Coleridge, later 4th Baron Coleridge, in 1936.
This watercolor was owned by Captain Charles Golding Constable (1821-1878), the artist’s second son. He spent his early years with the East India Company, and only returned to England in 1847. With the death of his elder brother John in 1841, he became the head of the family and as such he oversaw the division of his father’s studio collection in the winter of 1847-8. This drawing must have formed part of the group that came to him. In the 1860’s, Captain Constable retired from the East India Company and devoted his energies to putting his collection into good order. He sent a number of items to the dealer Hogarth for mounting and it is likely that the present work was included as it is on a mount of that period. At some unspecified date the drawing was acquired by either Herbert William Fisher or his son William Wordsworth Fisher. John Constable had been a close friend of the Fisher family, staying at Canbury Villa, home of Dr. Philip Fisher, Master of Charterhouse, in 1835.
This rare and unrecorded wash drawing is one of the earliest depictions of a scene which would become such a familiar element of the artist’s oeuvre - the River Stour near Flatford. It dates from the summer of 1803 when Constable made a small number of studies of his native Suffolk landscape. These took him as far as Ipswich and Felixstowe but also included views in the Stour Valley between East Bergholt and Dedham. In this drawing of the river landscape near the lock at Flatford, he depicts a string of grain barges moored alongside the Stour with towing horses resting, and the wooden footbridge crossing a stream.
The use of light watercolor tints over pencil is also to be found in his Warehouses and Shipping on the Orwell at Ipswich (In the Constable Bequest, Victorian & Albert Museum, no. 626-1888, G. Reynolds, The Early Paintings and Drawings of John Constable, 1996, no.03.56). That drawing, which is of approximately the same size, also dates from 1803. The light use of wash in the drawing of the trees also relates to Constable’s early drawings of Helmingham Dell (G. Reynolds, lit. op. cit, 1996, no. 00.1 and 00.2, Private Collection and Leeds City Art Gallery).