Harwich Lighthouse

John Constable is remembered for still, inland country: the water meadows and mills of the Stour valley in Suffolk, where he grew up. This is one of the few times he turned to face open water. Harwich, on the Essex coast just south of his home ground, was a busy packet port in 1820, where boats left for the Low Countries, and its low wooden lighthouse stood at the edge of the shifting sands. Constable gives it little of the drama a marine painter of the day would have reached for. The sea is low and grey-green, the sky does most of the work, and the light is a plain working structure rather than a landmark. He returned to this stretch of coast more than once, and two other versions of the scene survive. The family kept this canvas until his daughter Isabel gave it to the nation in 1888.