An unknown oil sketch by John Constable, one of Britain’s best-loved artists, has been discovered at the Victoria & Albert Museum.
The painting, of trees underneath an unsettled sky, was found concealed beneath a lining canvas on the back of Branch Hill Pond: Hampstead, another work by the English Romantic painter famous for The Hay Wain.
Conservators at the V&A, which was given the remaining contents of Constable’s studio by the painter’s last surviving child, Isabel, in 1888, found the sketch while attempted to remove the lining on the reverse after it became loose.
The V&A, which will be putting the previously unrecorded oil sketch on display tomorrow, said that Constable, who died in London in 1837, probably painted the scene in the late summer of 1821 or 1822.
During the period, the artist, who is known for his English landscapes, painted a number of sketches featuring similar cloud studies and motifs.
Conservators Clare Richardson and Nicola Costaras found the preliminary oil sketch while preparing works for a major 2014 exhibition, Constable: The Making Of A Master.
X-radiography had already revealed evidence of another composition, but it had been assumed that this was a sketch covered over when Constable painted Branch Hill Pond: Hampstead, Mirror informs.
