Trees at Hampstead

An inscription at the lower right gives Constable's name, London, and the year 1829. In November 1828 his wife Maria had died of tuberculosis, and in February 1829 the Royal Academy at last elected him a full member, at 52. The family had settled in Hampstead, then a village on London's northern edge, where he painted trees and skies again and again. This canvas carries a question, though. Tate's own catalogue calls the handwriting of the inscription hesitant and spidery and finds weak passages in the drawing of the trees. A 1979 catalogue of Constable's paintings by the Belgian scholar Robert Hoozee listed it as doubtful, while Tate still keeps it under his name. Even its older title, Trees near Hampstead Church, only goes back to a show at the London dealers Agnew's in 1910, the year the collector George Salting's bequest brought it to the National Gallery.