The Celebration in East Bergholt of the Peace of 1814 Concluded in Paris between France and the Allied Powers

The Treaty of Paris was signed on 30 May 1814 and Napoleon went to Elba. On 9 July the village of East Bergholt in Suffolk, where Constable was born and where his father ran the corn mills, sat about 800 people down at tables in the open air to mark it. Constable was there. He made a pencil sketch on the spot and then this small oil, 23 by 33 and a half centimetres, with the flag of the restored Bourbon kings over the tables and an effigy of Napoleon strung up among them. Within a year Napoleon was back in France and the same village was reading about Waterloo. The picture stayed in private hands for a century, until the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest bought it in 1913.