There is another image under the landscape.

In John Constable’s oil study for Hampstead Heath with a Rainbow, technical analysis has revealed an unfinished portrait beneath the stormy view of the Heath, thought to depict the artist’s uncle. It is a small discovery, but a useful one: it turns the painting from a finished object into a working surface, a place where one image gives way to another.

That feels like the right way into Constable’s Hampstead years.

Burgh House’s exhibition John Constable in Hampstead, opening to mark the 250th anniversary of the artist’s birth, is not just a local celebration of a famous painter. It looks at the years in which Hampstead became part of Constable’s work: the Heath, the weather, the search for cleaner air during Maria Bicknell’s illness, the social world that held him after her death, and the local rooms where he shared his thinking about landscape painting.

The risk with Constable is that he becomes too familiar. Hay Wain. English weather. National Gallery postcards. A safe idea of landscape. But Hampstead gives us a less settled artist: a man watching clouds, reusing canvases, writing letters, testing images, relying on friends, and returning again and again to the same local views as if they still had more to give.

For Litro’s Future Archives strand, that is the interesting part. Not simply what survives in a museum, but what a place keeps holding: the illness, the friendship, the lecture room, the buried portrait, the walk from Burgh House to Well Walk, the sky over the Heath.

I spoke with Amy Miller about Constable’s Hampstead years, the Heath as subject and refuge, his cloud studies, his collaboration with David Lucas, and what a local exhibition can show that a national gallery might miss.

Subject, sanctuary, studio

Eric Akoto: Constable’s Hampstead years seem to sit between refuge and experiment: Maria’s illness, the cleaner air of the Heath, and his intense study of weather. How do you want visitors to understand Hampstead in this exhibition: as subject, sanctuary, or studio?

Amy Miller: Ideally as all three. Constable’s Cloud Studies are famous, yet not everyone realises that the majority were done from the perspective of the higher ground on the Heath, and that it gave him the sense of wild nature and dramatically changing weatherscapes. Hampstead and the Heath also provided an emotional link to the Suffolk countryside of his youth.

Weather, science and biography

Eric Akoto: The cloud studies are often discussed for their immediacy and scientific observation. But in this context, they also feel emotional — records of instability, attention and loss. Does the exhibition ask us to read weather as biography?

Amy Miller: We touch on the Cloud Studies only briefly. During his time in Hampstead, beginning in 1829, Constable was also working with David Lucas, the printmaker who specialised in mezzotint, on what would become Various Subjects of Landscape, Characteristic of English Scenery, from Pictures Painted by John Constable, R.A., or simply known today as English Landscape Scenery.

It was one of the most significant partnerships for either man and a very close collaboration. Lucas created printed plates of Constable’s work, sending him the proofs. Constable would reply, annotating the proofs but also, in some cases, adding paint to them to show what he wanted.

That rich contrast between light and dark that mezzotint gave was particularly effective in conveying the moody, changing skies of Constable’s work. Between June 1830 and July 1832, the series of 22 mezzotints was published, and Hampstead and views of the Heath featured prominently in the publication.

What we wanted visitors to take away from Constable’s time in Hampstead is that for him it was both a place of inspiration and community. He sketched and painted the Heath, but he also shared his findings and observations of the weather and various meteorological effects — in essence, the science of landscape painting — with a like-minded audience at the local Literary and Scientific Society that met in the Assembly Rooms in Holly Hill.

He also had a very close friendship group in Hampstead who supported him throughout some of the darker periods of his life, specifically the death of his wife Maria in 1828.

The image underneath

Eric Akoto: The oil study for Hampstead Heath with a Rainbow has an unfinished portrait hidden beneath the landscape, thought to depict Constable’s uncle. What does that discovery change about how we look at the work?

Amy Miller: It is a wonderful oil study and really captures a lot of what Constable was trying to do in communicating his vision of landscape. This study was painted about 1830, and the final painting was produced in 1836. Although the rainbow has not yet been incorporated in this work, it still features the hallmarks of a later Constable painting with the dramatic cloudscape and brewing storm that dominates the landscape.

It is also interesting to see that he included a windmill and small, red-roofed house that did not exist on the Heath, but was taken instead from his painting A Windmill on the Downs near Brighton, circa 1824.

Constable was known to have reused canvases or painted on both sides of them in order to get as much use as possible. He had a reputation for being thrifty with his materials. What I think it really shows us is Constable’s process — how he keeps experimenting with these different views of the Heath, in this case Branch Hill Pond, and constantly refining them. Through this reused canvas we are aware that we’re getting a glimpse of the artist at work.

The private world around the painter

Eric Akoto: Personal letters and portraits sit alongside landscapes in the exhibition. Why was it important to show Constable’s social and domestic world, not only the finished image of the artist as landscape painter?

Amy Miller: The letters and portraits are incredibly important in that they give us much more of a sense of Constable himself, but also that network of relationships and social connections.

One letter that we have is a draft from 1833 written to the Reverend Henry Scott Trimmer. Trimmer had many friends in artistic circles, and the artist J.M.W. Turner, who was Constable’s friend and competitor, gave Trimmer painting lessons. Constable wrote to Trimmer declining a visit, but noting that he was looking forward to seeing Trimmer’s collection of Dutch paintings, particularly one by Jacob van Ruisdael of a ship in a storm. Ruisdael was one of the artists whose work influenced Constable’s own depictions of storms.

In the letter Constable also mentioned his friend and physician Herbert Evans, who said that Constable was “not at all fit to go anywhere.” On display is a portrait of Evans, a close friend and admirer of Constable’s work. The frequent illness of Constable’s wife and children meant that the young doctor made frequent visits to the artist’s home. He attended Constable’s wife Maria in her last illness and provided emotional support to him in the years following her death. Constable painted Evans’s portrait in early 1829, shortly after Maria’s death.

By considering Constable’s connections and relationships through the lens of his life and Hampstead, we hope to give a snapshot not only of the artist’s professional life, but how it entwined with his private life.

Seeing Constable locally

Eric Akoto: Burgh House is only moments from Constable’s Hampstead world. How does showing this material locally change the meaning of the exhibition compared with seeing these works in a larger national gallery?

Amy Miller: There is an intimacy to looking at Constable’s work in an interior of the period, in a house that he would have known, as Burgh House is literally around the corner from his last home in Hampstead, 6 Well Walk, now 40 Well Walk. His first home, Lower Terrace, was near to Branch Hill Pond, one of his favourite views of the Heath, which sadly no longer exists.

There is also an immediacy to the local geography of Constable’s life, and death. He lived and painted in Hampstead. He gave lectures on landscape painting to the Literary and Scientific Society at the Hampstead Assembly Rooms in Holly Hill. As we’ve seen from his friendship with Dr Evans, Constable maintained a social network of friends and families within Hampstead.

It was where his own children were happiest and where they continued to live after the death of their mother. After the death of their father in 1837, they moved across the Heath to Highgate, so still remained in relatively close proximity. Finally, a walk down the Georgian Church Row has at its end the parish church of St John-at-Hampstead, where Constable is buried with his wife and six of his seven children.

What the exhibition preserves

Eric Akoto: Future Archives is interested in how cultural memory survives through places, objects and institutions. What do you hope this exhibition preserves or reopens about Constable’s Hampstead years?

Amy Miller: I think it’s important to consider the role of place and space in Constable’s work. In some ways Hampstead reminded him of Suffolk. It provided an escape from the city of London, and in the Heath he found the rolling landscapes and big skies. He was fascinated with documenting the changes in the weather, times of day and seasons, and the Heath was the perfect place to do this.

It was hoped that Hampstead would provide a cure for Maria Constable’s tuberculosis and, when her health ultimately failed, Hampstead itself gave him a close-knit group of friends that sustained him through an incredibly difficult time in his life.

Hampstead, and Constable’s place in it, gives us a microcosm of life in Georgian London. It’s incredibly valuable in understanding, for example, that close relationship between art and science in the period through Constable’s lectures on his own practice at the Hampstead Literary and Scientific Society — which is now Romney’s House. These spaces are still, for the most part, preserved in Hampstead.

The archive under the weather

The strongest thing about John Constable in Hampstead is that it does not leave Constable safely inside the finished landscape. It puts him back into a working local world: the Heath, the letters, the friendships, the lectures, the clouds, the illness, the reused canvas.

That is why the hidden portrait matters. It reminds us that cultural memory does not always survive cleanly. Sometimes it survives underneath another image. Sometimes it sits inside a local house rather than a national room. Sometimes it is held by a place that still carries the walk, the weather and the names.

Constable’s Hampstead was not only a view. It was a surface he kept returning to.