Anne and Mary Constable The Artist's Sisters

When Constable painted his two sisters, around 1818, the family he grew up with in Suffolk was coming apart. Their father, Golding Constable, had died in 1816, and John had married that autumn and settled in London. The sisters stayed behind in the village of East Bergholt. On the left is Ann, the eldest, in a woman's version of a man's riding habit and a tall black hat. Her brother remembered her as boyish and devoted to her dogs and horses, and she later used her share from the sale of the family house to buy and restore an old cottage in the village. Beside her, Mary, the sibling he liked best, wears a red riding hood over a light muslin gown and looks past us, lost in thought. An ivy vine, an old sign of friendship and fidelity, winds between them. The whole double portrait is small, about 39 by 30 centimetres.