Touring exhibition: Constable: Oil Sketches from the V&A

The exhibition explores the later works of John Constable, Britain's best-loved landscape painter, and showcases some of the finest paintings from the V&A's world-renowned Constable collection. It includes the full-size oil sketches for The Hay Wain and The Leaping Horse, two of the painter's most prestigious works. Both of these important sketches have been cleaned specially for the exhibition, revealing their original colours and tonalities for the first time in living memory. These are displayed alongside a number of the artist's watercolours, drawings and oil studies. From the turn of the 19th century these works have captured the public imagination as representations of archetypal English landscape.

Locations & dates

Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn, 23 September 2010 - 23 January 2011
Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, 12 March - 3 July 2011

Museum of Fine Arts, Gent, 17 Septemner 2011 - 29 January 2012
Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey, 17 March - 10 June 2012
Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, 23 June - 30 September 2012

More on Constable: Oil Sketches from the V&A

Originally exhibited under the title 'Landscape: Noon', the finished painting was referred to by Constable's friend Archdeacon Fisher as 'The Hay Wain' as early as February 1821, and this soon became its popular name. A rustic scene of great calm, it shows a harvest wagon crossing a shallow stream near Flatford Mill; on the left is Willy Lott's cottage, which belonged to Constable's father and in the sight of which he himself had grown up.

It is fortunate that several preliminary studies for this composition have survived, for they enable us to obtain an insight into the artist's method of work. To begin with, there are the sketches from nature made in his early years, upon which Constable drew throughout his career. For example, there is a small oil sketch of Willy Lott's cottage in the Museum which has been dated about 1810-15. As was his practice with oil sketches of this period, he blocked in the main features in broad masses of strong, bright colours, giving the work a rough texture and a surprisingly modern appearance.

Years later, he made use of such early sketches when he was devising the composition of 'The Hay Wain' - even the dog has been retained in the final version. At this stage he made the small oil sketch for the whole composition in the  Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. Constable now faced the problem of converting these small, broadly executed oil sketches into carefully composed 'six foot canvases'.

It was at this point that he produced the large sketch, a full scale treatment of the subject but with the details only roughly indicated, the background merely blocked in and the predominant tone provided by the light brown canvas on which it is painted. By contrast, the full scale sketch of 'The Leaping Horse' is much more finished in both colour and detail. 'The Hay Wain' sketch really is an intermediary stage between the small sketch at Yale and the final version.

The finished picture in the National Gallery differs hardly at all in composition - only the figure on horseback in the foreground has disappeared - but it does show a more detailed treatment of the landscape, with firmer contours and more naturalistic colouring. It is by far the better known of the two, yet in some ways 'it is the sketch, with its rapid brush strokes, its flecks of white and green skimming the surface, and its generally broader treatment that accords more with modern taste.

Essential further reading on 'The Hay Wain'

• Reynolds, Graham, The Later Paintings and Drawings of John Constable, New Haven, London 1984, pp. 67-70, pls. 213-215.
• Lyles, Anne (ed.), Constable: The Great Landscapes, exhibition catalogue, Tate Britain 2006, pp. 140-145.