The Leaping Horse

By 1825 the Suffolk river of John Constable's boyhood existed mostly in his memory. He was in a London studio, painting the working Stour from studies and recollection, and each year he sent the Royal Academy one enormous canvas — a six-foot picture of ordinary barge traffic treated on the scale usually reserved for history and myth. This one catches a tow horse in mid-jump, clearing one of the low barriers built across the towpath to keep cattle from straying. Constable fussed over it endlessly, even shifting a tree from one side to the other after it was hung. He showed it simply as Landscape, with no leaping horse in the title at all.