Description
Attributed to Lionel Constable (British, 1828-1887)
Trees by the edge of a Field
pencil on buff paper
h:17 w: 25 cm
Provenance: Probably Leggatt Brothers, London, 1899; H A Sutch; Leggatt Brothers, 1952; by descent to the present owner (please refer to introduction by Anne Lyles for further information on provenance)
As noted above, two of Constable's children, Lionel Constable and Alfred Constable (1826-1853) were also artists, and drawings by each of these became mixed up with examples by John Constable during the nineteenth century when they were still owned by the latter's descendants.
Lionel Constable's hand is today more easily identifiable than Alfred's thanks to research undertaken on Lionel in the 1970s by Leslie Parris and Ian Fleming-Williams and their related publications ('Which Constable?', The Burlington Magazine, CXX, 1978, ppp.566-79; and Lionel Constable, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, 1982). Although Lionel's drawings are often very close in style to those of his father, John, his style is generally more tentative, and he tends to use a narrower range of compositional types as well as resorting to stylistic mannerisms. This drawing is very close to other sketches by Lionel which show a line of trees on the edge of a field gradually diminishing in size as they recede into the distance, thus creating the key perspective line in the composition (see for example no 51 in Tate catalogue, Near Stoke by Nayland, Tate). It is also similar in other ways to a drawing by Lionel, Looking to Harrow, in the Fogg Art Museum( repr Burlington Magazine, 1978, ill.32).
John Constable RA at Cheffins Fine Art, 5th & 6th March 2014
Introduction by Anne Lyles:
This remarkable group of drawings - seven by John Constable, and one attributed to his son, Lionel Constable - can be traced back to the stock of London fine art dealers Leggatt Brothers, who handled a large quantity of Constable's sketches in oil, watercolour and pencil in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The vendor's father purchased this group of drawings from Leggatt Brothers in 1952, for £500. The drawings had been committed for sale by H.A. Sutch. Sutch was also a London art dealer who, together with Fredrick C. Williams, had been in partnership with William Lawson Peacock with premises in Duke Street St James and Bond Street as well as in Princes Street, Edinburgh. Following Peacock's death in 1921, Sutch and Williams opened a gallery of their own, the United Arts Gallery, at 23a Bond street, where Sutch specialised in the Old Master side of the business ( American Arts News, vol 20, no.5, Nov 12, 1921).
As well as these eight drawings, Sutch is also recorded as having owned two other Constables: one, a pencil drawing, Dedham: Rain coming on, now in the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino, California (G.Reynolds, The Early Paintings and Drawings of John Constable, 2 vols, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 1996, no.14.75, plate 1220); the other, a watercolour, Bristol House and Terrace, Putney Heath, in a private collection (G. Reynolds, The Later Paintings and Drawings of John Constable, 2 vols, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 1984, no.18.18, plate 45. Sutch's name is mistakenly given under the provenance for this entry as H.S.Sutch, but is correctly referred to as H.A. Sutch in Reynolds's earlier Catalogue of the Constable collection in the Victoria & Albert Museum, 2nd edition, 1973, HMSO, pp.119-20 where he discusses another version of Bristol House in that collection).
The latter work, Bristol House and Terrace, Putney Heath (R.18.18)- although one of three versions of the subject - is very likely to have been the example shown, as no. 109, in an important exhibition of Constable's work mounted by Leggatt's in 1899, Pictures & Water-Colour Drawings by John Constable R.A. Exhibited at Messrs Leggatt's Gallery 77, Cornhill, London (see Reg Gadney, John Constable 1776-1837: A catalogue of Drawings and Watercolours, with a selection of Mezzotints by David Lucas after Constable for 'English Landscape Scenery' in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1976, p.86). Indeed, it seems likely that Sutch acquired his version of Bristol House at that exhibition, and probably the Constable drawing now in the Huntington as well (item no. 175 in the 1899 catalogue has a remarkably similar title, Dedham (Rain coming up) ).
Indeed, it seems highly probable that Sutch acquired the eight drawings catalogued here at the 1899 Leggatt's exhibition as well (or if not at the exhibition itself, then probably soon afterwards). The 1899 display was made up of works consigned for sale by two of Constable's grand-children, Hugh and Clifford Constable. Amongst the works included in the exhibition were some drawings which, although assumed by the two brothers to be by their grand-father, have since been identified as by one or other of Constable's artist sons, Lionel and Alfred (I. Fleming-Williams and L. Parris, The Discovery of Constable, Hamish Hamilton, 1984, pp.95-6 and L.Parris and I. Fleming-Williams, Lionel Constable, The Tate Gallery, London 1982). The fact that one of the eight drawings discussed here is almost certainly by Lionel Constable is another reason for assuming that Sutch acquired the group from Leggatts in 1899 or soon afterwards. Furthermore, it is interesting to note that the eight drawings have for many years been mounted and framed together in two sequences of four drawings per mount, and the 1899 exhibition catalogue similarly included numbered items of three or four drawings grouped together in series (numbers 96 and 99 are both listed in the catalogue as 'Four Pencil Drawings', and number 177 is listed as a 'Set of Four sketches').
- Anne Lyles, February 2014
