Hampstead Heath, Looking Toward Harrow

Bare trees stand along the crest of a heath as low cloud drifts toward the horizon above spooling smoke and distant Harrow, the spire catching the light. John Constable painted this little oil sketch on Hampstead Heath about 1821, the period when he was making the small en plein air oil studies that changed how he built his large exhibition canvases. The freedom of the touch and the directness of the sky study show him recording weather and atmosphere at first hand, the practice that fuelled the naturalism of his Suffolk masterpieces and earned him his later reputation as the father of modern landscape.