Summer Evening, Stoke-by-Nayland, Suffolk
John Constable, RA (East Bergholt 1776 - London 1837)
Category
Art / Oil paintings
Date
c. 1810 - 1815
Materials
Oil on canvas
Measurements
102 x 152 mm. (4 x 6 in)
Order this imageCollection
Anglesey Abbey, Cambridgeshire
NT 515728
Summary
Oil painting on canvas, Summer Evening, Stoke-by-Nayland, Suffolk by John Constable, RA (East Bergholt 1776 – London 1837), c. 1810-15. Church of St Mary’s, Stoke-by-Nayland, Suffolk occupying the skyline and dominating the picture. A few houses, whitewashed with red roofs line a wide road running from right to left across the foreground of the picture. Evening light of pinkish sky showing from the left.
Full description
The village of Stoke-by-Nayland in Suffolk is situated a few miles to the west of East Bergholt, and of Flatford on the River Stour, where Constable usually took his subject-matter. Nevertheless, in the early years of his career, Constable often visited Stoke-by-Nayland, especially from 1810 when he was commissioned to paint an altarpiece for the church of Nayland nearby. Stoke-by-Nayland’s imposing Gothic church, with its distinctive tower, appears frequently in Constable’s early drawings and oil sketches. It features, for example, on pages of sketchbooks dating from 1810, 1813 and 1814; as notations on loose sheets dating from 1814 to 1816; and in three similar small oil studies dateable to c. 1810-11 (G. Reynolds, The Early Paintings and Drawings of John Constable, 2 vols, New Haven and London 1996, nos 10.3, 13.17, 14.32; 14.62-64, 15.30,15.39, 16.31; and R. nos 11.44-45 and G. Reynolds, The Later Paintings and Drawings of John Constable, 2 vols, New Haven and London, 1984, no. 29.61). Although a few of these sketches were made by the artist from a distance, the majority show a view from closer range, with a lane and cluster of trees in the right hand foreground, and Stoke by Nayland’s church tower straddling the horizon on the left alongside neighbouring village buildings. This oil sketch shows a view looking towards the church from a path slightly closer to the centre of Stoke-by-Nayland village and, unusually, is depicted at sunset. It is almost certainly a study from nature. It is not known for sure when Lord Fairhaven first bought Summer Evening, Stoke-by-Nayland. However, we do know that it appears in a list of his collection of paintings by 1959, with a full attribution to John Constable. At some stage in subsequent years, the sketch was then downgraded to ‘After Constable’, that is, deemed to be by another artist in imitation of Constable’s work. This ‘mis-reading’ of the sketch’s true status can perhaps be explained by the fact that its composition is broadly similar to that of the print, Stoke by Nayland, published in 1830 for part two of Constable’s English Landscape, a collaboration with mezzotint engraver David Lucas, and thus presumed to be a copy from the print. In fact there can be no doubt about the sketch’s authenticity. It has all the hallmarks of Constable’s oil sketching style from his early period. Moreover, the out-turned tacking edge along the top edge is entirely characteristic of Constable’s practice. He would often turn out the tacking edges of his canvases during painting, or else sometimes he used cut up canvases and then incorporated the tacking edges into the surface area for painting. A label on the reverse of this sketch provides the source of the title and, also confirming the attribution to John Constable, is signed ‘C. Constable’, that is the artist’s second son Charles Golding Constable ( 1821-79). Indeed, It seems more than likely that the sketch can be identified as the work of the same title, lot 108, from C.G. Constable’s collection, sold by Christie’s in 1869. In the 1830s, towards the end of his life, Constable returned to the subject of Stoke-by-Nayland. He began working in the studio on a large-scale composition of the church seen from a nearby lane, no doubt depending for inspiration on the studies form nature he had made in Suffolk many years before. He presumably intended to paint a large exhibition canvas of the subject to send to the Royal Academy. However, he only got as far as producing a preliminary large- scale compositional sketch (Art Institute of Chicago Art; G.Reynolds, op. cit 1984, no. 36.19). Anne Lyles 2022
Provenance
Christie's, 15 April 1869, the property of Captain C. Constable, son of John Constable R.A., lot 108, 'Stoke-by-Nayland, Suffolk: out-door study: summer evening', bt. Fletcher, £6.16.6; bequeathed to the National Trust by Huttleston Rogers Broughton, 1st Lord Fairhaven (1896-1966) with the house and the rest of the contents.
Credit line
Anglesey Abbey, The Fairhaven Collection (National Trust)
Marks and inscriptions
Verso: Label: '? Summer Evening'.
Makers and roles
John Constable, RA (East Bergholt 1776 - London 1837), publisher
