An recently discovered new work by John Constable, Britain’s most famous landscape painter, has sold for £320,000 at auction.
The oil sketch had been in private ownership and was unknown to the wider world until its sale by Tennants Auctioneers in Yorkshire last Saturday.
Director of the company, Jane Tennant, told the BBC: “It’s certainly exciting that it’s a painting that hasn’t previously been recorded in any of the Constable literature.”
The picture, Dedham Vale, was listed with a £150,000 to £200,000 estimate.
John Constable was born in 1776 and is still much loved for his romantic landscapes, almost entirely created of and in the area of Suffolk in which he was shaped and lived.
A self-portrait of Constable.
In 1821 his most famous picture, the Hay Wain, was shown at the Royal Academy in London.
It was not particularly well liked, and wasn’t sold. However, Constable’s picture – now reproduced millions of times – inspired visitors from France, and his work helped inspire the styles that became Impressionism.
The most valuable of his pictures at auction is The Lock, which was sold in London in 2012 for £22.4 million.
The Hay Wain is in the National Gallery and the site where it was painted is now a tourist attraction.
The Hay Wain is one of the most reproduced paintings in British history.
However, Constable was not particularly successful in his own lifetime and was more popular over the Channel than in his native UK. The Hay Wain didn’t sell in London but won a Gold Medal at the 1824 Paris Salon.
This sketch was probably finished before 1814 and after 1809. It may be a preparatory work for the full scale landscape Dedham Vale that Constable finished in 1825.
The buyer has not been named and the work may return to private ownership.
Most of the world’s great art has been catalogued, but it’s not that unusual for new works to be found.
The most valuable picture of all time, Leonardo Da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, sold for $450.3 million in 2022. But the painting was bought for just over $1,000 as recently as 2005, when it was considered a low quality and poor condition copy of Leonardo’s style.
