Helmingham Dell (Louvre)

In the summer of 1800 Constable was 24, a young art student, and he spent it drawing in Helmingham Park in Suffolk, the estate of the Tollemache family. One subject was a deep wooded hollow crossed by a plank footbridge. A quarter of a century later he turned it into paintings, one in 1825 and 1826 for a friend who lived near the park, now in Philadelphia, and a larger one shown at the Royal Academy in 1830, now in Kansas City. This canvas is among his biggest oil sketches, almost the size of that exhibition picture. The Louvre's notes place it around 1829 or 1830, although one scholar dated it to the summer of 1823. Trees close over the bridge, a tiny figure touched with red stands on the path at the left, and the sky shows only in scraps between the leaves. It stayed in his studio until the sale after his death, in May 1838.