John Constable R.A. (East Bergholt 1776-1837 London)
East Bergholt Church, the south porch
pencil and watercolour on laid paper
27 x 19.7cm (10 5/8 x 7 3/4in).
Footnotes:
Provenance
Collection of H.W. Underdown
Probably Sale, Sotheby's, London, 10 December 1925, lot 95
With Leggatt Brothers, London
With Gerald M. Norman Gallery, 1971, by whom sold to Alfred Essex for £315
Private Collection, UK

Literature
G. Reynolds, The Early Paintings and Drawings of John Constable, New Haven and London, 1996, p.65, cat. no. 05.32, ill. pl. 271

The village of East Bergholt where Constable grew up provided material for many of his early works. His family home, East Bergholt House, was almost next door to St Mary's Church and the church was the subject of a number of sketches and paintings done in his early years. An oil sketch of the South porch and cupola taken from the same angle, of around 1810, is in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London (138 - 1888) and a related, finished oil painting now at Tate, London (N 01245) was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1810, no. 116 - one of Constable's earliest exhibited canvases.

Apart from the attachment Constable will have felt to East Bergholt Church, his representation of a churchyard is linked to a tradition of churchyard imagery that goes back to Thomas Gray's 'Elegy written in a country churchyard' published in 1751, a poem that Constable himself was to illustrate later in his career. In the present study the pencil outlines describe in detail the cupola and the tracery on the gabled South front, while broad watercolour washes fill in the shadows on the masonry, the trees on the left and the sky with its billowing clouds giving it all the immediacy of an on-the-spot sketch.