A casinha no campo de trigo

This small painting had a long, slow life. Constable seems to have begun it around 1817, a quiet corner of his native Suffolk, a cottage at the edge of a cornfield with the crop grown high beside it. Then he left it alone. Years later, wanting to finish the thing, he added the donkey and foal at the left, working them up from a life study he had drawn back in December 1815. Only in March 1833 did he call it done and send it to the Royal Academy exhibition, one of four pictures he showed that year. By then Constable was in his late fifties and long gone from the East Bergholt of his youth. His daughter Isabel gave the picture to the nation after his death.