1796
From the collection of Victoria and Albert Museum
A ruined cottage at Capel, Suffolk is a 1796 by John Constable, a Romanticism work, held at Victoria and Albert Museum.
This pencil drawing shows a lonely cottage in Suffolk. It’s one of Constable’s very first sketchbook pages from 1796. The scene is simple—just a low-roofed building—but the story behind it is spooky. The artist jotted a note up top: a few years earlier, a fire burned an old woman inside without touching the rest of the cottage. Neighbors blamed witchcraft. Smith, a writer working on a book about rural scenes, liked Constable’s sketches but never used them. Local legend and early sketches mix here. Next, look up the Victoria and Albert Museum.
A pen and ink drawing depicts a ruined cottage situated on the bank of a stream, with a surviving stone chimney, a missing roof, and leaning wall timbers and gable. The inscription notes a local legend involving a woman’s death by fire inside the cottage, with witchcraft suspected. The drawing originates from Constable’s earliest known sketchbook, created in 1796 when he had not yet committed to an artistic career. That year, he met J. T. 'Antiquity' Smith, who was collecting material for a book on rural scenery, though none of Constable’s sketches were included in the published work.
Read the full account in the museum source.
John Constable (; 11 June 1776 – 31 March 1837) was an English landscape painter in the Romantic tradition.
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