A Hilltop (His Native Village)

The second half of the title names the place as his native village, which for Constable meant East Bergholt in Suffolk. Around 1809, in his early thirties, he was spending long spells at his parents' house there, and this study comes from those years. It is painted in oil on paper, a quick and portable way of working in oils, and the sheet was later mounted on canvas. The sketch crossed the Atlantic early. By 1880 it was already in a Boston collection, and in 1923 it came to the Museum of Fine Arts with the bequest of Ernest Wadsworth Longfellow, a painter himself and the son of the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.