Stoke-by-Nayland

John Constable produced this full-size oil sketch near the end of his life, for an unrealized painting. It depicts the artist’s favored subject matter: the countryside of his youth in Suffolk, England. He wrote to a friend of this work: “What say you to a summer morning? July or August, at eight or nine o’clock, after a slight shower during the night.” To achieve the effect of sparkling wetness and the freshness of earth and air, Constable painted as much with a palette knife as with a brush, flecking the surface with white highlights as he sketched and scraped the picture into existence.