Hampstead Heath, with the House Called ‘The Salt Box’

In the summer of 1819 Constable rented a cottage up in Hampstead, then a village on a hill outside London, because his wife Maria's lungs were bad and the advice of the day was clean air. He was 43, and that November he was finally elected an associate of the Royal Academy after years of being passed over. The heath was the motif he could reach on foot from the door. This view takes in the open ground near Branch Hill Pond with the house local people called the Salt Box, named for its long sloping roof, which made it look like the lidded wooden box salt was kept in. The family later took a house in Well Walk in Hampstead, and Constable held on to it after Maria died of consumption in 1828. Branch Hill Pond has since disappeared from the heath.