The Quarters behind Alresford Hall

Constable painted this small canvas in 1816, on a commission from General Francis Rebow, who owned the Essex estate where the little building stands. It is a fishing lodge, put up in the 1760s in the Chinese taste that was fashionable then — a touch of pretend pagoda tucked into the English woods, where the family came to sit and angle on the pond. For Constable the timing mattered more than the subject. He had been in love with Maria Bicknell for years, and her well-off family had blocked the match because he was only a struggling landscape painter with no steady income. The fee from Rebow's commissions helped tip the scales, and that October, at last, Constable and Maria married. He described the lodge in a letter to her while he was still at work on it, calling it a beautiful little fishing house where the young lady of the estate went sometimes to fish.