Portrait of John Constable RA

This intimate portrait is almost miniature in scale and was probably painted as a private memento of friendship. Charles Leslie RA was a successful portrait painter but is today best known as Constable’s first biographer – he published Memoirs of the Life of John Constable six years after the artist’s death. The biography was based on correspondence between the pair, who were close friends from the mid-1820s until Constable’s death in 1837.

This portrait has become the most enduring image of Constable’s appearance, both because of its wide dissemination in Leslie’s book and because of Constable’s lack of interest in projecting a public persona through portraiture. The painting remained in Constable’s family and was given to the Royal Academy by his daughter in 1886.