John Constable, RA, 
British 1776-1837- 
The ruins of St Botolph's Priory, Colchester; 
pencil...

John Constable, RA, 

British 1776-1837- 

The ruins of St Botolph's Priory, Colchester; 

pencil and stump on thin laid paper watermarked with an elaborate crown (J WHATMAN), inscribed 'St Botolphs Priory / Sept 19' (lower left), 20.2 x 24.6 cm. 

Provenance: 
Private Collection, UK. 

Note: 
We are grateful to Anne Lyles for confirming the authenticity of the present work based on first hand inspection. 

Constable executed drawings in Colchester on a number of occasions in the first half of his career, when he was still returning to Suffolk and Essex on a regular basis to stay with his family and to continue his sketching from nature. The present work dates to c.1808 and presumably relates to a number of other pencil sketches he made of St Botolph’s Priory in the same year. These include two smaller drawings (Graham Reynolds, ‘The Early Paintings and Drawings of John Constable, 1996, nos 08.14 and 08.15), a larger drawing now in the Yale Center for British Art [no. B1975.2.591] (Reynolds 08.16), and a further double-sided smaller drawing which appeared at Christie’s, London, 3 July 2012, lot 127. In the same year, Constable also took some sketches of the Church of St Mary-ad-Murum Church at Colchester and Colchester Castle (Reynolds 08.12 and 08.13). 

Not only is the present work stylistically similar to Constable’s other Colchester drawings taken in 1808, his materials and technique also relate, in his use of pencil and application of stump for shading, as well as his use of thin laid paper. The watermark here corresponds to that listed in W.A. Churchill, ‘Watermarks in paper in Holland, England, France, etc. in the XVII and XVIII centuries and their interconnection’, 1935, no.415, and is possibly the same mentioned by Graham Reynolds under 08.12 (St Mary-ad-Murum), described as ‘a crown above a circle’. Whilst the latter was taken on 29 October, the present work apparently dates to 19 September 1808, around five weeks earlier.