햄스테드 히스, 브랜치 힐 연못

Hampstead in the 1820s was not yet London. It was a village on a hill above it, and the heath below Branch Hill Pond was a working place where sand and gravel were dug out and carted away, which is why a horse and cart come over the rise in so many of Constable's versions of this view. He returned to it more often than to anything else at Hampstead, developing the pictures from a single oil sketch. A reviewer of the time described a shower that has just passed over, with flitting clouds throwing light and shade across the country. On the back of the stretcher Constable wrote his London address in Charlotte Street, the label he used for pictures going to the Academy. He painted this one in 1828, and it came to the museum in 1857 with the gift of the Yorkshire cloth manufacturer John Sheepshanks.