John Constable reshaped English landscape painting from the fields of his native Suffolk, and the British Museum marked his 250th birth anniversary with a free show of his late drawings and prints.
The British Museum in Bloomsbury marked 250 years since the birth of John Constable, painter of The Hay Wain, with a free display of his late graphic work. It closed on Sunday 4 October 2026.
Constable was born in 1776 in East Bergholt, Suffolk, son of a wealthy corn merchant who expected him to take over the family mills. He persuaded his father to let him study at the Royal Academy Schools instead, in 1799.
He painted the fields and waterways of the Stour valley for much of his career. In 1821 he told a friend that painting was only another word for feeling.
He sold more of his work in France than in England in his lifetime, and inspired the Barbizon school there. He was elected to the Royal Academy at fifty-two.
The display in Room 90a drew mainly on the Museum’s own collection, transformed in 1888 by a gift from his daughter, Isabel Constable. It showed drawings, studies for the oils and sketches of clouds and rainbows made at Hampstead in his last years.
Ten plates from English Landscape, his mezzotint series with the engraver David Lucas, were shown alongside them.