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By the end of September, Constable was sketching at Borrowdale and spent three weeks there, making numerous watercolour studies. This view of Borrowdale is inscribed "1 Octr 1806" and gives the added detail that it was made in the "Evening after a fine day." Once again, the focus is on transitory atmospheric conditions, but his "natural painture" remains a blend of direct observation and of seeing through the eyes of the earlier artists. Here there are parallels with the watercolor technique of Thomas Gainsborough (cat. nos. 7-8), a fellow Suffolk artist who exerted a great influence on the young Constable. The almost monochromatic palette, bright highlights on the water and dark tonality all suggest first-hand knowledge of Gainsborough's drawings, which he could have studied in Beaumont's collection. On the authority of C. R. Leslie, it is also customary to associate these early watercolors with those of Thomas Girtin. Beaumont encouraged Constable to study his collection of Girtins, but the similarities between the two arists here are fairly slight. Aside from following Girtin's example of using a wet brush loaded with pigment, Constable's studies are far less fastidious than Girtin's, although admittedly Girtin was making finished watercolors and Constable only sketches. But the two were separated by Constable's concern to expunge all artifice, manner, or "fashion" from his technique in pursuit of a "natural painture." However, his exertions proved a commercial failure. Although these sketches and studies were used to make finished Lake District views exhibited with Royal Academy until 1809, his work continued to received little or no attention from the critics.

Matthew Hargraves

Hargraves, Matthew, and Scott Wilcox. Great British Watercolors: from the Paul Mellon collection. New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 2007, pp. 120-121, no. 51