Castle Crag, Borrowdale

Castle Crag, Borrowdale was painted by John Constable during his time in the English Lake District in September and October 1806. This visit occurred at the outset of Constable’s career and was crucial to his development as an artist. The unfamiliar and challenging landscape required him to broaden his skills and experiment with a great variety of technical and compositional approaches.

By 25 September Constable was in Borrowdale, a remote and previously little-visited valley in the north-west of the district. He spent an unprecedented three weeks there, attracted by the variety and complexity of the peaks surrounding the valley. This study shows, on the left, the steeply rounded hill named Castle Crag situated in the area known as the ‘Jaws of Borrowdale’, where the upper valley narrows to a steep gorge. Although only about three hundred metres high, Castle Crag has an impressive appearance, and Constable made two other watercolours of the subject from different viewpoints, both dated 4 October, which perhaps provides a date for this work as well.

Constable approached the complex terrain of receding peaks, gullies and wooded ground by describing the landscape forms in terms of contrasting tonal masses using fluid watercolour washes. His free, gestural brushwork is particularly evident in the mass of trees in the right foreground. This tonal technique enabled him both to analyse the rugged and weighty forms of individual landscape features and to articulate their spatial relationships.

The unfamiliar environment seems to have been intensely stimulating to Constable. He described it as ‘the finest senry [sic] that ever was’,¹ and made close to a hundred studies during this time. Two-thirds of the sketches were watercolours. This was the new and fashionable medium for landscape painting, but Constable seems to have used it more for reasons of convenience and cheapness. Most of them have faded, including the present work, owing to Constable’s use of an unstable blue pigment. They were intended as studies towards finished works in oil, and for three years following the trip Constable painted at least ten canvases of Lake District subjects.

Vicki Robson

This essay appears in Art at Te Papa, (Te Papa Press, 2009)

1. Cited in Leslie Parris and Ian Fleming-Williams, Constable, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London, 1991, p. 404.