National Gallery of Australia | Audio Tour | Constable

This painting is the second version of A ploughing scene in Suffolk (A summerland). The owner of the first version of 1814 , John Allnutt, a Clapham wine merchant and collector, became unhappy with the sky in his painting and asked another artist, John Linnell, to overpaint it. Some years later, around 1825, Allnutt admitted: ‘I was foolish enough’ to have Constable’s original sky ‘obliterated’ and that, ‘though extremely beautiful’, the new sky ‘did not quite harmonize with the other parts of the picture’ (Beckett I, p. 83). He asked Constable to restore the original sky and, ‘if he could do it without injury to the picture’ reduce the height of the painting to match another work in his collection (Augustus Callcott, Open landscape: Sheep grazing c.1812, York City Art Gallery). Graciously, Constable took back Allnutt’s pictureand painted a second and slightly smaller version for him – this painting. He did this free of charge because he was grateful to Allnutt for ‘buying the first picture he ever sold to