La route de Spaniards, Hampstead

Constable moved his family up to Hampstead in 1819, onto high ground north of London, partly for his wife Maria's health and partly to get them clear of the city's coal smoke. In the summers of 1821 and 1822 he spent most of his painting time on the sky. He made something like 100 oil studies of cloud out on the Heath, most of them on paper, and on the back of many he noted the date, the hour and the direction of the wind, the way a man keeping a weather log would. This one looks along the ridge road that runs past the Spaniards, an old tollgate inn on the way to Highgate, and gives the ground only a low mound across the bottom of the sheet. He had arrived at that proportion deliberately. At a London exhibition in 1819 he went round measuring how much of the picture Dutch painters such as Jacob van Ruisdael had given to sky against land.