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From a grassy riverbank, we look across the placid surface of a river lined along the far bank with trees and farm animals in this horizontal landscape painting. The scene is painted loosely with brushstrokes visible throughout, so some details are difficult to make out. For the surface of the river, russet-brown and steel-gray paint skims lightly across the canvas and leaves some unpainted areas visible, creating the effect of light shimmering on the still water. On our left, a shallow wooden barge is propelled along the stream by two men in red caps with long poles. The boat carries a white horse wearing blinders and a harness. The riverbank beyond is lined with pale, sage-green grass tinged with gold, growing in front of a tangle of darker green trees and bushes. Across the water from us near the middle of the picture, a small rowboat sits in the shallows at the foot of a steep riverbank. Above, a white cottage with a reddish roof and chimney is tucked behind the trees, with a wooden rack full of hay next to it. Nearby, a plow and wheeled cart, highlighted with strokes of white, sit near more mounds of hay. Rocky fields reach into the distance. The vista is blocked to our right by another clump of trees and a rocky outcropping, rising from the stream, to our right of center. The steep, dark roof of a farmhouse is barely visible among the trees. Along the riverside to our right, a small group of cinnamon-brown and cream-white cows stand at water's edge. A rolling pasture stretches behind them to meet blue hills in the distance. Above, in the upper third of the painting, mottled white, pale rose, and gray clouds rolling across a steel-gray sky are reflected in the water below.

The White Horse, 1818-1819

John Constable

West Building, Main Floor — Gallery 57

This six-foot-wide canvas was something new for a 19th-century artist: it’s a sketch the same size as the final painting (now in the Frick Collection in New York). Constable’s earlier works were smaller, and other artists’ large landscapes often overshadowed them in exhibitions.

In response, he made The White Horse bigger than any of his previous paintings. In it, a barge carries a white horse across the Stour River (in Suffolk, England) to its tow path on the other bank.

To achieve this new and unfamiliar scale, Constable first painted a “full-sized sketch.” He formed the overall composition using broad brushstrokes without including details. Constable found this process so helpful that he continued it for the rest of his career.

Dive deeper

The White Horse by John Constable (1776–1837) is a full-size oil sketch of one of the artist's first large-scale landscape paintings. The final version, now part of the Frick Collection in New York, was first exhibited in 1819 at the Royal Academy and was the beginning of a series of works that became famously known as the "six-footers" for their grand size. The scene is a view from the south bank of the River Stour in the countryside around Suffolk, England, where the artist was born. The barge in the lower left corner is carrying a horse from the towpath on the near side of the river to the opposite bank.

Hidden beneath this painting is a version of another Constable painting, Dedham Vale from the Coombs. The artist reused the canvas and painted over the scene to create the The White Horse sketch. The painting that is visible today was once obscured by paint added by someone other than Constable over a century ago, perhaps in an effort to make it look more finished. Through microscopic examinations, x-radiography, and painstaking analysis, expert conservators and scholars were able to decipher the multiple layers of paint on the canvas. The work was cleaned over a period of several years, from 1992 to 1997, and the lively and well-preserved Constable sketch was revealed.

More information on this painting can be found in the Gallery publication British Paintings of the Sixteenth through Nineteenth Centuries, which is available as a free PDF.

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Object Data

Medium

oil on canvas

Dimensions

overall: 127 x 183 cm (50 x 72 1/16 in.)

framed: 164.5 x 219.7 x 17.2 cm (64 3/4 x 86 1/2 x 6 3/4 in.)

Credit Line

Widener Collection

Accession Number

1942.9.9

Artists / Makers

John Constable (artist) British, 1776 - 1837

Image Use

This image is in the public domain.
Read our full Open Access policy for images .

Detail Information

Provenance

Almost certainly retained in the studio by the artist until his death in 1837.[1] John (later Sir John) Pender [b. 1816], by 1872.[2] (E. Fox White Gallery, London), by 1882;[3] sold to (Wallis & Son, London); purchased 1893 by Peter A.B. Widener, Philadelphia, and Lynnewood Hall, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania; inheritance from Estate of Peter A.B. Widener by gift through power of appointment of Joseph E. Widener, Elkins Park; gift 1942 to NGA.

[1] The Gallery's painting is the first of the artist's full-scale sketches for his six-foot canal scenes. The finished painting based on this sketch is now in The Frick Collection, New York.

[1] Pender lent the painting to the 1872 Winter Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, Works of the Old Masters, together with Works of Deceased Masters of the British School.

[2] See the letter from Wallis & Son to P.A.B. Widener, 1 January 1909, in NGA curatorial files.

Associated Names

Pender, John, Sir
Wallis & Son, Henry
White Gallery, E. Fox
Widener, Joseph E.
Widener, Peter Arrell Brown

Exhibition History

1872: Works of the Old Masters, together with Works of Deceased Masters of the British School. Winter Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1872, no. 118.

2006: Constable's Great Landscapes: The Six-foot Paintings, Tate Britain, London; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, 2006-2007, no. 28, repro.

Technical Summary

The medium-coarse canvas is tightly plain woven; it has been lined at least
twice. The ground is white lead and chalk. There is a tan-colored imprimatura.
X-radiographs made in 1984 reveal that the work is executed, comparatively
thinly, over an unfinished (but fairly complete) painting of Dedham Vale from
the Coombs; they also show pentimenti in Willy Lott's cottage, which was
originally positioned at the same angle as in the finished picture in the Frick
Collection, and around the horse and barge. There is no lead white ground
between the two paintings. Both paintings are executed broadly and sketchily
with some passages in impasto. The paint layers have been compressed and the
impasto flattened to an unusual degree in the course of linings, the last of
which was in 1948. For a combination of reasons apparent from this summary the
paint structure is hard to examine, but it seems likely that there was extensive
damage and repainting at an early date. The gray-purple tone over most of the
sky appears to be a later glaze applied over abraded paint; there is repainting
in the white horse, the figure to its left, the cows, the foliage, and the
water. Worn areas in the sky at right, numerous separation cracks, and an old
tear in the foreground center were treated in 1949. There is a 34-cm. crack
near the top edge, corresponding to the bottom edge of the top stretcher member.
The unusually thick natural resin varnish has discolored yellow to an
exceptional degree.

Bibliography

1892: Smetham, Sarah and William Davies, eds. Letters of James Smetham. 2d ed. London and New York, 1892: 289-291.

1915: Roberts, William. Pictures in the Collection of P.A.B. Widener at Lynnewood Hall, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania: British and Modern French Schools, Philadelphia, 1915: unpaginated, repro.

1923: Paintings in the Collection of Joseph Widener at Lynnewood Hall. Intro. by Wilhelm R. Valentiner. Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, 1923: unpaginated, repro.

1931: Paintings in the Collection of Joseph Widener at Lynnewood Hall. Intro. by Wilhelm R. Valentiner. Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, 1931: 170, repro.

1948: Paintings and Sculpture from the Widener Collection. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1948 (reprinted 1959): 95, repro.

1960: Reynolds, Graham. Catalogue of the Constable Collection in the Victoria and Albert Museum. London, 1960: 27.

1963: Walker, John. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. New York, 1963 (reprinted 1964 in French, German, and Spanish): 321, repro.

1965: Reynolds, Graham. Constable: The Natural Painter. London, 1965: 63.

1965: Summary Catalogue of European Paintings and Sculpture. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1965: 29.

1968: National Gallery of Art. European Paintings and Sculpture, Illustrations. Washington, 1968: 22, repro.

1975: European Paintings: An Illustrated Summary Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1975: 72, repro.

1975: Walker, John. National Gallery of Art, Washington. New York, 1975: no. 594, color repro.

1979: Hoozee, Robert. L'opera completa di Constable. Milan, 1979: 149, repro., no. 618.

1983: Rosenthal, Michael. Constable: The Painter and His Landscape. New Haven and London, 1983: 117, pl. 152.

1984: Reynolds, Graham. The Later Paintings and Drawings of John Constable. 2 vols. New Haven and London, 1984: 1:27-31, no. 19.2; 2:color pl. 69.

1984: Walker, John. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Rev. ed. New York, 1984: 408, no. 579, color repro.

1985: European Paintings: An Illustrated Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1985: 93, repro.

1990: Rhyne, Charles S. "Constable's First Two Six-foot Landscapes." Studies in the History of Art 24 (1990): 109-129.

1992: Hayes, John. British Paintings of the Sixteenth through Nineteenth Centuries. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. Washington, D.C., 1992: 32-39, repro. 35.

2000: Kirsh, Andrea, and Rustin S. Levenson. Seeing Through Paintings: Physical Examination in Art Historical Studies. Materials and Meaning in the Fine Arts 1. New Haven, 2000: 200-202, 279, color figs. 217-219.

2006: Kelly, Franklin. "John Constable, The White Horse." and Swicklik, Michael. "Uncovering Constable's Lost Sketch for The White Horse." Bulletin / National Gallery of Art, no. 35, (Fall 2006): 2-7, figs. 1 and 2; 8-11, figs. 1-6.

2009: Gariff, David, Eric Denker, and Dennis P. Weller. The World's Most Influential Painters and the Artists They Inspired. Hauppauge, NY, 2009: 99, color repro.