Attributed to John Constable

When John Constable died in 1837, the sketches and studies left in his London house passed to his children, and his youngest son, Lionel, painted too. Lionel's small oil landscapes were so close to his father's that for generations many of them were sold and collected as John's. In the 1970s two Constable specialists, Leslie Parris and Ian Fleming-Williams, who had organised the Tate's bicentenary exhibition of 1976, began publishing the evidence in the Burlington Magazine, and in 1982 the Tate gave Lionel an exhibition under his own name.

That history is why museums handle this label with care. Attributed to John Constable means the cataloguer thinks a picture is probably his and stops short of saying so. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston uses this label for a small portrait of an unknown woman, painted in oil on board around 1818 and given to the museum in 1961.