A sketchbook lies open, showing Constable’s watercolour of a Sussex chalk bank, newly eroded to reveal the spectacle of a human skeleton. A woman below a tree melts like wax in seething brown oil paint. Dawn breaks as a needle of white paper in a swathe of dark ink. What you are looking at, before all else, is the mysterious behaviour and potential of paintīut they are the essence of this show, which brims with art made mainly for himself. They cost him dearly, made him nothing, and were never shown in his lifetime. Constable worked on them for months at a time, saying only that they were not for public consumption, compared to the finished “exhibition” versions. Five or six feet wide, painted on canvases that were probably tacked to the studio wall, these so-called sketches are an amalgam of spontaneously veering brushstrokes that scarcely shape themselves to the scenes they describe. Like The Leaping Horse – in which river, rider, barge and horse are barely distinguishable up close in the mass of claggy paint – the sketch for Hadleigh Castle is entirely without precedent. “I shall never feel again as I have felt,” Constable wrote to his brother, “– the face of the World is totally changed to me.” Its origins lie in a pencil sketch made even before he met Maria, as if a dark memory of life before her was suddenly resurfacing in this storm of turbulent brushstrokes. With its ruined towers and black birds circling in the chill white air above endless flatlands, this desolate vision is shot through with sorrow and fear. The devastating oil “sketch” of Hadleigh Castle, for instance, was painted during her final illness.

Royal Enigma by K.B.