Cenotaph to the Memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds

Constable finished this in 1836, the last thing he ever showed at the Royal Academy and, as it turned out, painted a year before his own death. The subject is not a landscape he stumbled on but a shrine. It is a stone monument that Sir George Beaumont had raised in his Leicestershire park to Joshua Reynolds, the Academy's first president, flanked by busts of Michelangelo and Raphael. Constable had sketched the spot back in 1823 and only now worked it up into this autumnal wood, russet leaves closing over the memorial. He slipped a stag into the clearing for a touch of wildness, though at that scale the animal would tower over the real monument. The picture did not sell.