Brighton Beach

On the back of this strip of paper Constable wrote the date, 12 June 1824, and then a note on the weather. He first put "taking the air", crossed it out, and wrote "squally day" instead. A heavy slate-grey sky fills most of the sheet, the sea below it is a flat band of dull green, and a couple of small figures stand on the beach at the left, with a sailing ship out on the horizon beyond them. That was the first summer his family spent in Brighton. The following January he packed a dozen of his Brighton oil sketches into a box for his friend John Fisher, a clergyman. Fisher sent them back in the spring, calling them fresh, hasty and unpolished, and the museum thinks this sheet may well have been one of them.