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John Constable, 1776–1837, British, Stratford Mill, 1819 to 1820

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Creator:

John Constable, 1776–1837

Title:

Stratford Mill [1998, This Other Eden: paintings from the Yale Center for British Art, exhibition catalogue]

Former Title(s):

Stratford Mill, "The Young Waltonians" [1985, Cormack, YCBA Concise Catalogue]

Landscape [1820, Royal Academy of Arts, London, exhibition catalogue]

Date:

1819 to 1820

Materials & Techniques:

Oil on canvas

Dimensions:

51 1/2 × 72 1/2 inches (130.8 × 184.2 cm), Frame: 66 × 88 inches (167.6 × 223.5 cm)

Inscription(s)/Marks/Lettering:

Signed, lower right: "John Constable. R. A. | London"

Typeset inscription on label on work’s reverse (top right corner of the frame): “Mill in Essex attributed to J. Constable | Owner: Mrs. Alice Schoenfeld SELIGSON”; other typeset label in German on the painting's reverse (top left corner of the frame): "Sammlung Alice Schoenfeld / Mill (?) von Essex”

Credit Line:

Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund

Copyright Status:

Public Domain

Accession Number:

B1983.18

Classification:

Paintings

Collection:

Paintings and Sculpture

Link to Frame:

B1983.18FR

Subject Terms:

Associated Places:

Access:

On view at the Yale University Art Gallery

Link:

https://collections.britishart.yale.edu/catalog/tms:5052

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Around 1818–19, John Constable began creating large-scale paintings (known as “six-footers”) that were intended for the annual exhibitions at the Royal Academy. The challenges of painting on this new monumental scale encouraged him to adopt the unusual practice of creating full-sized sketches to guide his work. This is one of those sketches, made for a landscape now in the National Gallery, London, and derived from a small oil study made en plein air in Suffolk in 1811. These full-size sketches were never meant for a public display and reveal Constable working out aspects of his final composition, such as the placement of the standing boy holding a fishing pole. In the final painting, Constable removed the figure, giving the fishing rod to one of the kneeling children on the right.

Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2016

Based on its size, this work could easily be mistaken for a finished painting, but it is a preparatory sketch for a landscape now in the National Gallery, London. The composition of Stratford Mill derives from a small oil study (now in a private collection) painted en plein air in 1811, at which time the artist was residing in his native Suffolk. By the time John Constable had developed the motif into a finished painting, he had relocated to London. In London, Constable began creating larger-scale paintings, which led him to rethink the typical size of his compositional sketches. The resulting full-size sketches, such as the present one, may have served as aids of recollection or as working documents, but they were never meant for a public audience. They reveal an expressive and material dimension to Constable’s practice, however, that is carried through to his exhibition pictures.

Gallery label for Critique of Reason: Romantic Art (Yale Center for British Art, 2015-03-06 - 2015-07-26)

This is the full-scale oil sketch for one of Constable's exhibition pictures, commonly known as "six footers": he was slow and meticulous in his working processes and painted such a sketch before each of the large landscapes that he showed at the annual Royal Academy exhibitions from 1819 onward. His main aim at this stage was to see how the masses of light and dark would work across the composition. Brilliant and full of life though his sketches are, he regarded them as a means to an end, preferring to be judged by works of detail and "finish." He showed the exhibition version of the present view at the Royal Academy in 1820 (now at the National Gallery in London). Stratford Mill was a watermill that powered a paper factory on the river Stour, near the artist's birthplace. The barge in the middle distance is waiting to pass a lock off to the right.

Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2005

Constable considered his highest achievement as an artist to be the series of exhibition pictures on a large scale, about six feet across, that he showed at the annual Royal Academy exhibitions from 1819 onward. Unlike his great contemporary Turner, he was slow and meticulous in his working processes, and prepared for each of these grand compositions by painting a full-scale oil sketch. The present work is the sketch for the second in the series, which he showed as his main picture at the exhibition of 1820 (National Gallery, London). Stratford Mill, which appears at the far left of the composition, was a watermill that powered a paper factory on the river Stour in East Anglia. The view is looking downriver, roughly to the south, with the Langham Hills in the distance on the right; judging from the light, it is about noon on a late summer's day. This was Constable's native countryside. He knew the Stour valley intimately and found most of his landscape subjects there, choosing views that represented not just the beauty of the area, but an Edenic relationship between the land, mankind, and God. He delighted in nature for its own sake, here noting such facts of natural history as the slanted growth of trees in the prevailing wind and, with the dead trunk in the foreground, the way a river could kill trees by washing through their roots. But his particular interest lay in nature as tended and turned to good use by man, and Stratford Mill illustrates almost as in a diagram the uses of the Stour: it is a source of power for the mill; a working thoroughfare for the barge, which is waiting to pass a lock outside the picture to the right; and, as shown by the children fishing and the horse drinking (to the right of the mill), the provider of food and fresh water.
Unlike the nearby Flatford and Dedham mills, which Constable also painted (see no. 54), Stratford Mill was not a family property. Nevertheless it was full of boyhood associations for him, and there is little doubt that the children fishing represent some form of nostalgic autobiographical recollection. Like the great Romantic poet Wordsworth, he thought of childhood as a state closer to nature and to God, and his Stour valley landscapes are his attempts to see the place as a boy again, his vision pristine, intense, and sparkling. As he worked out the composition of the painting in his studio in London, Constable drew on earlier material: the left half clearly derives from an oil sketch made on the spot in 1811, and some of the woodwork and water-lilies near the lower right corner are from drawings in a sketchbook of 1813. He tried out his idea for the composition as a whole in a small sketch, then painted the present full-scale sketch as a run-through before embarking on the more finished, exhibitable version.1 The work is rough and experimental. It shows the artist changing and elaborating on the smaller compositional sketch in a number of ways, notably by replacing the reclining figure of an angler with the dead tree trunk. It also shows him trying and rejecting ideas as he went along: an obvious pentimento reveals that the fishing rod of the standing boy in the red waistcoat was originally much higher, for instance. His main aims in the work were probably to establish the number and positions of the figures, and to see how the broad masses of light and dark would work together across the composition. In the end he concluded that there should be fewer figures and in the final version omitted both the standing boy and the girl near the mill on the left. Constable did not usually sign his full-scale sketches, considering them to be private studio work and not for public consumption; the signature on the present work is almost certainly false.
Constable exhibited the finished picture as simply Landscape; it has been known as Stratford Mill for convenience, as has the present sketch. Both works have also been given the additional title of The Young Waltonians, a reference to Izaak Walton's famous book on angling. This caught on after being used for a mezzotint of the finished picture published some years after the artist's death.

Malcolm Warner

Julia Marciari-Alexander, This other Eden, paintings from the Yale Center for British Art , Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 1998, pp. 18, 132, 134, no. 53, fig. 17, ND1314.3 Y36 1998 (YCBA)

Created by John Constable (1776-1837), the artist; acquired by Wynn Ellis (1790-1875), 30 Cadogan Place, Middlesex; purchased by "Renson" at Christie, Manson & Woods, London, England, July 15, 1876 (lot 44, 'Young Waltonians'), in "The Celebrated Collection of…Wynn Ellis, Esq." [1] [a]; … ; acquired by Alice Seligson (née Mayer, formerly Schoenfeld, 1883-1972), Zurich, Switzerland, and Berkeley, California, ca. 1920 [2] [b];… ; purchased at auction by John Baskett Ltd. at Sotheby Parke Bernet & Co., London, July 6, 1983 (lot 267, "The Young Waltonians - Stratford Mill - The Full-Scale Sketch") in “Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century British Paintings” as Property of a Gentleman, on behalf of the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven [c] [d].

Notes:
[1] Described in the 1876 sale catalog as being after Constable. Only the buyer's last name appears in the catalog as an annotation in cursive script. May possibly be the collector Ernest Renson, although no works by Constable are auctioned at Ernest's sale at Galerie Georges Giroux in 1924: https://bibliotheque-numerique.inha.fr/idurl/1/60900.

[2] See label on work’s reverse (top right corner of the frame), which reads: “Mill in Essex attributed to J. Constable / Owner: Mrs. Alice Schoenfeld SELIGSON”. Another label on the reverse (top left corner of the frame) reads in German “Sammlung Alice Schoenfeld / Mill (?) von Essex”, which suggests that she only bought the work after 1907 when she married her first husband, Morris Schoenfeld, but before her second marriage to Albert Seligson in 1942.

[3] Alice appears to have brought the work with her to America when she emigrated in 1940. She evidently kept it with her during her residence in Berkeley, CA and lent it to the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum (now the de Young Museum) in San Francisco, CA in 1968.

Citations:
[a] Christie, Manson & Woods. July 15, 1876. The Celebrated Collection of Pictures and Watercolor Drawings, Formed by that Well-Known Amateur Wynn Ellis, Esq., Deceased. Art Sales Catalogues Online (Brill: 2000), https://doi.org/10.1163/2210-7886_ASC-36734

[b] Graham Reynolds, The Later Paintings and Drawings of John Constable (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 1:45, https://collections.britishart.yale.edu/catalog/orbis:582470

[c] Sotheby Parke Bernet & Co. Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century British Paintings. July 6, 1983. https://worldcat.org/en/title/171369707

[d] Malcolm Cormack, Constable, Japan: The Yomiuri Shimbun, 1986, pp.154, no.27

YUAG European Galleries (Yale University Art Gallery, 2023-12-01 - 2025-01-15) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition]

In a New Light: Paintings from the Yale Center for British Art (Yale University Art Gallery, 2023-03-24 - 2023-12-03) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition] [Exhibition Description]

The Critique of Reason : Romantic Art, 1760–1860 (Yale University Art Gallery, 2015-03-06 - 2015-07-26) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition]

Constable - The Great Landscapes (The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, 2007-02-03 - 2007-04-29) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition]

Constable - The Great Landscapes (National Gallery of Art, 2006-10-01 - 2007-01-02) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition]

Constable - The Great Landscapes (Tate Britain, 2006-06-01 - 2006-08-28) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition]

This Other Eden : British Paintings from the Paul Mellon Collection at Yale (Art Gallery of South Australia, 1998-09-16 - 1998-11-15) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition] [Exhibition Description]

This Other Eden : British Paintings from the Paul Mellon Collection at Yale (Queensland Art Gallery, 1998-07-15 - 1998-09-06) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition] [Exhibition Description]

This Other Eden : British Paintings from the Paul Mellon Collection at Yale (Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1998-05-01 - 1998-07-05) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition] [Exhibition Description]

John Constable (Tate) (Tate Britain, 1991-06-13 - 1991-09-15) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition]

John Constable (The Yomiuri Shimbun, 1986-01-30 - 1986-06-17) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition]

Acquisitions : The First Decade 1977-1986 : Yale Center for British Art, , Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 1986, pp. 5, 9, 12, no. 9, col. pl. 7, N590.2 .A7 OVERSIZE (YCBA) [YCBA]

Nina Amstutz, Landscape and the Architecture of Light: John Constable's Clouds at the Yale Center for British Art, Oxford University Press, London, 2017, p. 2, fig. 1, V 2736 (YCBA) [YCBA]

John Baskett, Paul Mellon's Legacy: a Passion for British Art: Masterpieces from the Yale Center for British Art, , Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 2007, pp. 34, 35, 288, fig. 8, N5220 M552 P38 2007 OVERSIZE (YCBA) [YCBA]

Ronald Brymer Beckett, Constable and his critics, Apollo, vol. 82, London, July 1962, pp. 365-371, N1 A54 82 OVERSIZE [ORBIS]

Malcolm Cormack, Concise Catalogue of Paintings in the Yale Center for British Art, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 1985, pp. 58-59, N590.2 .A83 (YCBA) [YCBA]

Malcolm Cormack, Constable, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK & New York, NY, 1986, pp. 33, 113..., pl. 110, NJ18 C74 C75 OVERSIZE (YCBA) [YCBA]

Martina Droth, Britain in the world: Highlights from the Yale Center for British Art in honor of Amy Meyers, Yale University Press, New Haven, London, p. 108, N6761 .Y33 2019 (LC) (YCBA) [YCBA]

H. G. Fell, Constable's Stratford Mill for the Nation, Connoisseur, vol. 118, September 1946, p. 53, N1 C75 117-118 OVERSIZE [ORBIS]

Ian Fleming-Williams, Constable and his drawings, Philip Wilson Publishers Ltd, London, UK, 1990, pp. 290-91, fig. 265, NJ18 C74 F53 1990 (YCBA) [YCBA]

Charles John Holmes, Constable and his influence on landscape painting, Archibald Constable and Company, Limited, Westminster, UK, 1902, oop. p. 92, Folio A N80 (YCBA) [YCBA]

John Constable's correspondence, H. M. Stationery Off., London, vol. 6, p. 76, NJ18 C74 A2 1962 (YCBA) [YCBA]

George Dunlop Leslie, John Constable, R.A., Art Journal, Virtue, London, January 1903, p. 8, British Periodicals [ORBIS]

Anne Lyles, Constable : the great landscapes, , Tate Publishing, London, UK, 2006, pp. 37, 23,48,, no. 30, NJ18 C74 C77 2006 + (YCBA) [YCBA]

Julia Marciari-Alexander, This other Eden : Paintings from the Yale Center for British Art, , Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 1998, pp. 18, 132, 134, no. 53, fig. 17, ND1314.3 Y36 1998 (YCBA) [YCBA]

Leslie Parris, Constable : pictures from the exhibition, , Tate Publishing, London, UK, 1991, pp. 40-41, NJ18 C74 P373 1991 (YCBA) [YCBA]

Leslie Parris, Constable, Tate Publishing, London, UK, 1991, pp.199, 200..., no. 99, NJ18 C74 P372 1991 + (YCBA) [YCBA]

Leslie Parris, The Later Paintings and Drawings of John Constable, Book Review , Burlington Magazine, vol. 127, March 1985, pp. 165, 167, N1 B87 + (YCBA) [YCBA]

Paul Mellon's Legacy : a passion for British art [large print labels], , Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 2007, v. 3, N5220 M552 P381 2007 OVERSIZE (YCBA) [YCBA]

Graham Reynolds, Constable, the natural painter, Panther, St. Albans, UK, 1976, pp. 15..., NJ18 C74 R48 1976 (YCBA) [YCBA]

Graham Reynolds, Stratford Mill by John Constable, R.A., Art at Auction, 1983, pp. 48-53, fig. 1, N8640 S62 A7+ (LSF - MUDD) [ORBIS]

Graham Reynolds, The later paintings and drawings of John Constable, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1984, p. 45 (v.1), no. 20.2, pl. 130 (v.2), NJ18 C74 R485 + (YCBA) [YCBA]

Duncan Robinson, Acquisitions : The First Decade 1977 - 1986, , Burlington Magazine, vol. 128, October 1986, pp. 5, 9, 12, no. 9, col. .pl. 7, N1 .B87 128:3 OVERSIZE (YCBA) [YCBA]

Michael Rosenthal, Constable, Thames and Hudson, London, UK, 1987, pp. 109, 111, NJ18 C74 R683 (YCBA) [YCBA]

Andrew Shirley, The published mezzotints of David Lucas after John Constable, R.A., a catalogue and historical account , Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1930, p. 201, no. 38, NJ18 C74 S5 + (YCBA) [YCBA]

Ian St. John, Dedham : Constable country, Suffolk Walker, East Bergholt, 2005, p. 21, fig. no. 28, V 2535 (YCBA) [YCBA]

The Royal Academy, The Graphic, London, Saturday, January 9, 1886, p. 31, Available online at 19th Century Brit Newspapers Article retrieved from 19th Century British Newspapers [ORBIS]

Izaak Walton, The compleat angler, or, The contemplative man's recreation. Being a discourse of fish and fishing, not unworthy the perusal of most anglers ..., T. Maxey for Rich. Marriot, London, pp. 16-17, Ig W175 653 (BEINECKE) [ORBIS]

John Wilmerding, Essays in honor of Paul Mellon, collector and benefactor : Essays, , National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC & Hanover, NH, 1986, pp. 70-8, N7442.2 M455 1986 (YCBA) [YCBA]

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