East Bergholt Church and Village

Though he lived and worked in London, Constable spent a number of summers visiting his family home in East Bergholt and sketching the landscape of the area. He gathered visual material that he would later work up into exhibition pictures back in his studio. This image, a meticulous description of the porch of St. Mary’s Church in East Bergholt village, is one of these sketches. In it, his controlled handling of the pencil allows him to capture as much detail as possible. In flickering touches of graphite, he has painstakingly recorded the rough texture of the building’s surface as it appears in afternoon shadow (2022).