John Constable, one of the foremost landscape painters of the nineteenth century, was invited to paint this small landscape and a larger companion picture, Wivenhoe Park, Essex (National Gallery of Art, Washington DC),
by his patron and friend Major General Francis Slater Rebow, in the late summer of 1816. As the artist wrote to his fiancée, Maria Bicknell, on 21 August that year:
My dearest Love,
I returned from my very pleasant visit at General Rebow’s on Monday … I am going to paint two small Landscapes for the General, views[,] one in the park of the house & a beautifull wood and peice of water, and another
a scene in a wood with a beautifull little fishing house, where the young Lady (who is the heroine of all these scenes) goes occasionally to angle. (R. B. Beckett, ed., John Constable's Correspondence, vol. II,Suffolk
Records Society, Ipswich, 1964, p. 196)
This painting depicts the ‘little fishing house’ (now known as ‘the Quarters’) at Alresford Hall. The Quarters had been built in the 1770s, in the fashionable chinoiserie style, for Slater Rebow’s father-in-law. During
the mid eighteenth century, Chinese garden pavilions were frequently placed beside lakes or ponds and were used for informal parties, fishing or boating. The closely observed details of Constable’s scene (the dappled
light, the lilies on the still water, the skimming swallows) indicate not only the season but also the time of day: a late summer’s afternoon.
Text by Dr Alison Inglis from 19th century painting and sculpture in the international collections of the National Gallery of Victoria, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2003, p. 18.
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John Constable:
（1776-1837 British John Constable Locations 1837). English painter and draughtsman. His range and aspirations were less extensive than those of his contemporary J. M. W. Turner, but these two artists
have traditionally been linked as the giants of early 19th-century British landscape painting and isolated from the many other artists practising landscape at a time when it was unprecedentedly popular. Constable has
often been defined as the great naturalist and deliberately presented himself thus in his correspondence, although his stylistic variety indicates an instability in his perception of what constituted nature. He has
also been characterized as having painted only the places he knew intimately, which other artists tended to pass by. While the exclusivity of Constable approach is indisputable, his concern with local scenery was not
unique, being shared by the contemporary Norwich artists.
By beginning to sketch in oil from nature seriously in 1808, he also conformed with the practice of artists such as Thomas Christopher Hofland (1777-1843), William Alfred Delamotte, Turner and, particularly, the pupils
of John Linnell. Turner shared his commitment to establishing landscape as the equal of history painting, despite widespread disbelief in this notion. Nevertheless, although Constable was less singular than he might
have liked people to believe, his single-mindedness in portraying so limited a range of sites was unique, and the brilliance of his oil sketching unprecedented, while none of his contemporaries was producing pictures
resembling The Haywain (1821; London, N.G.) or the Leaping Horse (1825; London, RA). This very singularity was characteristic of British artists at a time when members of most occupations were stressing their individuality
in the context of a rapidly developing capitalist economy
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