JOHN CONSTABLE, R.A.
(1776-1837)
 

Coal Brigs on Brighton Beach

1824

pencil, pen and ink and wash on paper

17.5 x 25.5 cm

P.119

Drawn in 1824 when Constable took his wife, Maria, to Brighton for her health; she was suffering from tuberculosis and died in 1828. He disliked the crowds and the bustle; writing in a letter of 29 August 1824 he describes it thus: ‘Brighton is the receptacle of the fashion and off-scouring of London. The magnificence of the sea…is drowned in the din and tumult of stage coaches, gigs, flys etc., and the beach is only Piccadilly or worse by the seaside’. However, he made a number of drawings of the life on the beach including several of colliers. Reynolds suggests this drawing is one of thirty by Constable from 1824, twelve of which were to be engraved in Britain and published in Paris by his dealer John Arrowsmith. However, the project was not undertaken. This drawing was probably started on the beach and worked up later with the addition of pen and ink to provide greater contrasts. The high contrast depicted in this sunset would have been ideal for a printer to transcribe.

Coal had been an important part of the family business and Constable’s father had owned a brig called the Telegraph.

Constable was born at East Bergholt in Suffolk, in 1776. While his parents wished him to be ‘worldly’, they were able to provide financial support from the family business, so that he might pursue his artistic ambitions. Despite this, his proposal of marriage to Maria Bicknell was opposed by her grandfather, the Reverend Dr Durand Rhudde who was Rector of East Bergholt, due to Constable’s refusal to abandon painting and take a profitable profession. They eventually married in 1816. He was elected A.R.A. in 1819 and R.A. in 1829.

EJ/CB

PROVENANCE: Spink & Son Ltd, from whom purchased by Gallery, May 1957.

EXHIBITIONS: Watercolours and Drawings from The Cecil Higgins Art Gallery Bedford, London, Thos. Agnew & Sons Ltd, 1962, no.54; A Loan Exhibition of Drawings & Watercolours by East Anglian Artists of 18^th & 19^th centuries, London, P&D Colnaghi Ltd., 1970, no.14; British Watercolours- A Golden Age 1750-1850, Kentucky, J.B. Speed Museum, 1977, no.52; Masters of the Sea, New Haven, Yale Center for British Art & Greenwich, National Maritime Museum, 1987, no.81; The Art Treasures of England: The Regional Collections, London, R.A., 1998, no.223.

REFERENCES: H. Day, John Constable Drawings, 1975, p.147, pl.149; G. Reynolds, The Later Paintings and Drawings of John Constable, 2 vols., 1984, I, p.144, no.24.47, illus. pl. 518; M. Rosenthal, Constable, 1987, p.151; I. Fleming-Williams, Constable and his Drawings, 1990, p.212, n.5.