John Constable gallery opens at Gainsborough House Sudbury

The new exhibition at Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury, showcases John Constable’s greatest painting and opened at the weekend and contains one of the artist’s greatest paintings.

The Leaping Horse, on loan from the Royal Academy in London, is a six-foot piece which secured Constable’s position as a major landscape painter.

Calvin Winner, executive director, Gainsborough’s House, said: “The Leaping Horse, painted in 1825, is thought by many to be Constable’s greatest painting.

“It depicts a barge horse jumping one of the barriers erected along the path by the River Stour to prevent cattle from straying.”

Calvin Winner, Executive Director at Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury (Image: Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury)

Mr Winner said: “Dedham Church is present, and the bridge marks a county boundary – the horse is in fact leaping over a crossing which takes the horse and rider from Essex into his native Suffolk.

“The Leaping Horse takes for its subject the traffic on the River Stour, and Constable depicts a scene in Suffolk where he spent his ‘careless boyhood’. He claimed that the Suffolk countryside ‘made him a painter’.”

John Constable’s The Leaping Horse at Gainsborough’s House (Image: Gainsborough’s House)

The exhibition also presents pieces from Sudbury-born portrait and landscape artist Thomas Gainsborough and Romantic artist J. M. W. Turner.

Mr Winner said: “Both Constable and Gainsborough were famous for coming from the Stour River Valley, so to bring these two artists together is a wonderful thing.

“Born in East Bergholt, Constable was a great admirer of his Suffolk forebear Thomas Gainsborough, telling a friend, ‘I fancy I see Gainsborough in every hedge and hollow tree’.

“It’s also a celebration of the Suffolk countryside as well, which is arguably England’s greatest artistic landscape, having inspired these two wonderful artists.”

Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788). Landscape with Cattle, a Young Man Courting a Milkmaid, early 1770s. (Image: Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury)

The exhibition, which celebrates the magnificence of landscape art in Britain in the 18th and early 19th century, will run from this weekend until mid-October.

It is the first time Constable’s The Leaping Horse will be exhibited in his home county, and Mr Winner encourages as many people as possible to see this wonderful array of Suffolk landscape paintings.