Half-size Sketch for The Opening of Waterloo Bridge (“Whitehall Stairs, June 18, 1817”)

The bridge opened on 18 June 1817, exactly two years after the battle of Waterloo, and the Prince Regent came down to Whitehall Stairs to board a state barge in front of a crowd. Constable watched it and started sketching that summer. Then he could not let the picture go. He was a painter of Suffolk fields and mill streams, not of royal pageants, and the ceremony cost him more than a decade of trouble, in trials like this half-size version, before he finally showed the full canvas at the Royal Academy in 1832. On varnishing day there Turner, hanging next to him, dropped a spot of red into his own grey seascape to kill Constable's glitter. Constable's remark was that Turner had been there and fired a gun.