Weymouth Bay with Approaching Storm

This canvas grew after its first showing. Constable painted the bay near Weymouth, on the Dorset coast, around 1818, and in 1819 he exhibited it at the British Institution, a London exhibiting society. Towards the end of the 1820s he took it up again and added canvas at the top and on the left, which gave the stormy sky still more room. The engraver David Lucas reproduced it in that larger shape before 1830. After his death it went through several sales, and in 1872 the printed results of one of them said it had been bought for the newly founded Metropolitan Museum in New York. That purchase never went through. In 1873 it passed to John W. Wilson, a British collector living in Paris, who gave it to the Louvre that same year.