Sketches by John Constable in the Victoria and Albert Museum

Amid all the drama of Constable imitations and fakes, there is one collection that remains essentially unchallenged - the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum. It was given to the Museum in 1888 by Isabel Constable, the artist's last surviving daughter, with the specific intent of keeping together a nucleus of unassailable work which had been left in the artist's studio at the time of his death. Isabel Constable's magnificent gift of some 400 sketches at once made the V&A the principal single repository of Constable's work. The sketch is central to Constable's art and the essence of that art- the depiction of his native landscape in a naturalistic manner- can be much more readily grasped in his sketches than in his finished paintings. Indeed, during the first half of his career, he painted hardly any finished pictures, and even after he concentrated more on these from about 1819, he continued to be most inventive in his sketches. His oil sketches in particular, with their unequalled directness, are among the greatest triumphs of British painting. This monograph reproduces 66 works by Constable and traces the origin and development of his art.