John Constable valuation
The Hay Wain, Flatford Mill and the skies over Hampstead, by the painter who made the Suffolk countryside a national landscape.
John Constable (1776–1837) was born at East Bergholt in Suffolk, the son of a mill owner, and entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1799.
What a work by John Constable is worth
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Bio
John Constable (1776–1837) was born at East Bergholt in Suffolk, the son of a mill owner, and entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1799. He painted the valley of the River Stour, around Flatford Mill and Dedham, again and again, and from 1819 to 1825 showed at the Academy a series of large canvases of it, the 'six-footers', among them The Hay Wain of 1821, now in the National Gallery. Shown at the Paris Salon in 1824, it won a gold medal and impressed Delacroix and a generation of French painters. He made oil sketches out of doors, painted Salisbury Cathedral and Hampstead Heath, and studied the clouds at Hampstead in 1821–22. He was elected a full Academician only in 1829.
Constable's market is full of attribution questions. His family kept much of his work, and paintings by his son Lionel and by other followers were sold as his for decades before scholars separated them from the 1970s onwards; imitators and forgers were active throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Oil sketches and drawings make up most of what comes to market, and their value turns on the attribution, the subject and the condition. The mezzotints David Lucas engraved after his paintings for English Landscape Scenery, published in 1830–32, are the accessible prints, and impressions from Constable's lifetime are worth more than those printed later.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
