Rediscovered: Preparatory Sketch for one of John Constable’s Most Personal Paintings

‘The Glebe Farm’

to headline Sotheby’s Old Masters Evening Auction this December

Painted by the great English Romantic Artist in Memory of his
life-long friend, mentor and patron, The Bishop of Salisbury

LONDON, 21 NOVEMBER 2021 – This season’s Old Masters Evening Auction at Sotheby’s will be led by a recently rediscovered work by the greatest of the English Romantic landscape painters, John Constable. A preparatory study for The Glebe Farm – one of the artist’s most personal and treasured compositions, now at the Tate Gallery, London, the oil sketch is among the most significant additions to Constable’s canon of work in recent years. Highlighting the auction on 8 December, the study will be offered with an estimate of £3-5 million.

Julian Gascoigne, Sotheby’s Senior Specialist of British Paintings commented, “The existence of a lost preparatory study for ‘The Glebe Farm’, one of the most personal and evocative of Constable’s great paintings, has long been known by scholars. Listed in the artist’s studio sale, the re-emergence of this important work after 180 years, particularly in such an exceptional state of preservation, represents one of the most significant and exciting discoveries in Constable scholarship for a generation”.