Between 1819 and 1837, John Constable produced over 100 oil sketches and paintings on Hampstead Heath. They changed the course of Western landscape painting. Here is the story of those years.
In 1819, John Constable rented rooms at Lower Terrace in Hampstead, bringing his family for the summer to escape the heat and disease of the city below. He was 43 years old, recently elected an Associate of the Royal Academy, and dissatisfied with the conventions of English landscape painting in ways he had not yet found the means to resolve.
The Cloud Studies
What followed was one of the most sustained and systematic programmes of outdoor painting in the history of Western art. Over 18 years of visits to Hampstead — initially for the summer, later year-round, after his wife Maria became too ill to travel — Constable produced over 100 oil sketches of the Heath, many of them focused specifically on the sky. He was pursuing something specific: the weather. He wanted to paint air, light, and movement — the things that conventional landscape painting had always treated as background and he now insisted were the subject.
The Method
The cloud studies are small, rapid, intensely observed. Constable worked directly from nature, often in poor weather, and the resulting works have a freshness and immediacy quite unlike anything else in English art of the period. The backs of many of the studies are inscribed with the date, time, and weather conditions — "5th of September 1822. 10 o'clock, morning, looking south-east, brisk wind." The precision is scientific as well as artistic.
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The Legacy
The Hampstead paintings were not universally appreciated in Constable's lifetime. Critics found the sky studies unfinished; collectors wanted the picturesque landscapes he also produced. But when his work was exhibited in Paris in 1824, it caused a sensation. Delacroix revised his technique in response. The Barbizon School in France took Constable's attention to observed nature as a founding principle. The influence on Impressionism was direct and acknowledged. All of this from the top of a hill in North London.
## The Hampstead years and why they changed his work
John Constable first rented a summer cottage in Hampstead in 1819, for his wife Maria's health. He returned every summer until 1827, when he moved the family permanently to 40 Well Walk, and he remained in the area until his death in 1837. The decade of Hampstead residency produced some of the most important works of his career — not the big exhibition pieces he was known for in the 1820s, but the rapid oil sketches of clouds and Heath landscape that reshaped British landscape painting after his death.
The Heath offered Constable a particular combination of elements he could not find at his home studio in Suffolk: constant cloud movement (the ridge at Parliament Hill runs at 98 metres, high enough to catch weather systems moving east from the Thames estuary), accessible open ground where he could set up an easel, and a range of lighting conditions from exposed ridge to enclosed woodland.
## The famous paintings and where they are now
Hampstead Heath, with a Rainbow (1836) — now in Tate Britain — was painted from a position near what is now the Parliament Hill athletics track. The viewpoint looks south-east across the Heath toward Highgate, with the storm clearing to the right.
The Hampstead Heath with Pond and Bathers (1821) is in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. The composition is the Hampstead No. 1 pond (the Mixed Pond) with the ridge beyond; the site is unchanged.
View from Hampstead Heath (1822) — in the Yale Center for British Art — shows the Suffolk-like rolling ground of the West Meadow. Much of the specific topography still matches the painting; the same stand of oaks at the top of the rise is still there (some of the trees Constable painted still live).
The Haywain (1821), his most famous picture, was not painted in Hampstead — but was substantially completed at his Hampstead studio during a summer visit, using cloud studies made from Parliament Hill as reference.
## The cloud studies
The dozens of small oil cloud studies Constable made in Hampstead — many from the window of 40 Well Walk or from outdoor positions on the Heath — are arguably the most influential works he produced. He dated them precisely and recorded wind direction and weather conditions on the back. Several are in the V&A, a cluster at the Royal Academy, others scattered through American collections. They were made for Constable's own reference and never exhibited in his lifetime.
## Walking the Constable sites
Start at 40 Well Walk (private, plaque on the front). Walk up to the top of East Heath Road and enter the Heath at the South End Road gate. From there, the positions of the major Heath paintings are spread across roughly a 2 km loop: the Mixed Pond, Parliament Hill, the West Meadow, and the oaks near the top of the rise. The Heath and Hampstead Society has marked some of the positions with low plaques; the Society's free Constable walking map is available from Burgh House.
## Constable's grave
St John-at-Hampstead churchyard, on the south side of the path from the west door. Marked with a low stone chest-tomb. Maria Constable is buried alongside him.
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Written by
James Calloway
James is an outdoor enthusiast, urban walker, and nature photographer whose passion for the Heath began on childhood weekend walks with his grandfather. He documents seasonal changes, wildlife sightings, and the quieter corners of Hampstead that most visitors never find.
