National Gallery of Australia | Audio Tour | Constable

During his honeymoon in 1816 Constable painted a number of oil sketches of the Dorset coast, including two sketches of Bowleaze Cove in Weymouth Bay. He later worked up this exhibition picture based on one of those outdoor sketches (now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London). He showed the curve of the bay, with a cliff in the foreground and hills beyond, and depicted a dense mass of cloud over the sea nearing the coast. Passages of sunlight in the sky light up the hills and the bay. Some time between 1819 and 1830 Constable extended his original painting by adding strips of canvas at the top and left to give a greater expanse of sea and sky. It was this version of the oil painting that Lucas used as a basis for the mezzotint, Weymouth Bay, Dorsetshire . In his biography of Constable, Andrew Shirley remarked: He recorded a dramatic moment at Weymouth … broken storm-clouds pass over an unquiet sea, where the earth’s safe helmet of grass ends abruptly at the bright cliffs. Years later, in a mezzotint, he