Bow Fell, Cumberland

In the autumn of 1806 Constable spent two months walking in the Lake District, a trip his uncle David Pike Watts had pressed on him and helped to pay for. He was 30 and had not yet found his subject. He came home with close to 100 drawings and watercolours, worked some of them up into oils like this one in his London rooms, and sent them to the Royal Academy in 1807 and 1808. They were the first things of his that anyone much noticed. Then he stopped. His friend and biographer Charles Leslie later wrote that the solitude of the mountains oppressed Constable's spirits, that he could not be satisfied by scenery without people in it, and he never went back to the fells. The Clark also owns his watercolour of nearly this view, done in browns instead of these greens and blues.