Hampstead Heath, Blick nach Harrow

A piece of paper about a foot across, painted on the spot and laid down on canvas later. Constable made hundreds of these and sold almost none of them. They were his own working stock, and after his death in 1837 they stayed in the family, where this one sat for the next 50 years with his daughter Isabel. She was the last of his children living, and in 1888, the year she died, she handed a large group of the sketches to the South Kensington Museum in London, now the Victoria and Albert. What she had not given away came onto the market after her death, which is how so many of them left England. This sheet was bought from a London dealer in 1895 by the Cleveland collector Jeptha Wade, who gave it to the museum there in 1916. The view runs west across the Heath, and the rise on the horizon with a spire on it is Harrow, a few miles off.