1796
From the collection of Victoria and Albert Museum
Dominant colour
Landscape with a stream at Wenham is a 1796 by John Constable, a Romanticism work, held at Victoria and Albert Museum.
This drawing shows a countryside scene near Wenham, Suffolk. It’s one of Constable’s earliest dated works. The artist made it in 1796, before he decided to be a full-time painter. Constable was still helping his father’s business that year. He met a writer collecting images for a book on rural life. Constable sent him quick sketches of local cottages, but they didn’t end up in the book. This early sketch hints at his future talent. Check out the technique of cross-hatching.
This pen and ink drawing from 1796 depicts a lightly sketched landscape featuring a stream flowing past a wood on the right bank and a distant cottage on the left bank, near Wenham, Suffolk. Created early in Constable's artistic development, the work reflects his emerging interest in rural scenery before he fully committed to an art career. The drawing is part of one of his earliest known dated sketchbooks, produced the same year he corresponded with writer J. T. Smith about contributing cottage sketches to a publication. Though Smith initially showed interest, none of Constable's drawings…
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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