It was a view that John Constable sketched and painted dozens of times. From the top of Hampstead Heath, London’s highest point at 134 metres (440ft), the artist would look west and north towards today’s suburbs of Willesden, Edgware and Harrow. About 100 metres away, down below, was a beautiful natural pond.
But in the 1880s, Branch Hill pond dried up. Now, nearly two centuries after Constable immortalised on canvas his favourite landscape in the capital, the pond has been recreated.
A pit has just been dug with a lining of puddling clay to hold the rainwater, which has arrived after the summer’s drought. It will be completed next spring with amphibians introduced, though not fish, as well as plants such as marsh marigold and reeds placed in and around the pond. It is hoped insects such as dragonflies will be attracted, while the revitalised habitat should encourage hedgehogs, a dying species in London, to return to a pathway and area they once frequented.
“Recreating the pond allows us, once again, to visualise the landscape Constable captured 200 years ago,” said Jeff Waage, president of the Heath and Hampstead Society. “It’s also important for the local environment. It’s critical for wildlife of all kinds on what is, after all, London’s most biodiverse area of land.”
Constable first ventured on the heath as a student at the Royal Academy at the turn of the 19th century. He did a few sketches. But once he moved to Hampstead in 1819, mainly because his wife Maria was suffering from tuberculosis, it became his most frequented spot. Hampstead, then primarily rural with horses drinking from the pond and cattle chewing the cud, reminded him of his youth in Suffolk with its fields and the waters of the River Stour.
Many assume that Constable took his easel and oils to the heath to paint en plein air (outside) rather like Claude Monet or Pierre-Auguste Renoir later did. “Not so,” said Estelle Lovatt, who gives weekly tours of Constable’s Hampstead, where he lived at six different addresses during the last 18 years of his life until his death in 1837. Constable would carry just a sketchbook or a piece of paper plus pencils, charcoal and paints. “Only when he got back to his studio would he use the sketches to turn them into an oil painting,” she said.
These sketches were never intended to be displayed but, after his death, his daughter Isabel gave many to the Royal Academy, the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Several oils, such as Branch Hill Pond, Hampstead Heath, with a Boy Sitting on a Bank (c1825) and Branch Hill Pond, Hampstead Heath, with a Cart and Carters (c1825), are owned by Tate Britain.
The view over Branch Hill pond offered Constable a perspective of the heath plus the skies overhead. He was by instinct conservative, loving the unchanging countryside for its own sake and loathing the beginnings of Britain’s industrialisation. He even saw it as a duty to paint landscapes, believing that “God had made them”.
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Yet in the early decades of the 19th century, landscape art was often frowned upon as portraiture was still much more in vogue. In the early 1820s, Sir Thomas Lawrence, president of the Royal Academy and a portrait artist himself, even disapprovingly called Constable’s landscapes “nasty little green things”. It was only months before Lawrence died in 1830 that Constable was finally elected a Royal Academician when he was already 52.
“It was as much the skies and clouds which fascinated him,” said Lovatt. Constable had been brought up by a corn merchant father, who was always keeping a close eye on the weather for his crops and business. He in turn passed on his learning to his son.
Constable made copious notes about the weather, clouds and wind speeds in regularly written diaries. In one entry, he referred to a local woman, who approached him on the heath and told the artist that she “had seen the clouds you paint”. Constable replied: “These are not my clouds. They were here long before I started.”
It is also very likely that the sky in what is probably his most famous painting, The Hay Wain, was not that of the Suffolk-Essex border and the Stour, but of Hampstead, looking out over the pond. After all, it was not completed until 1821, by which time Constable had been living in Hampstead for two years.
The recreation of the Branch Hill pond has been a long-term project, now realised, of the Redington Frognal Association. Frognal is the local area, so named in the 13th century because of the many frogs in the marshy district. Nearly £40,000 has been raised by the association from the City of London Corporation, the mayor’s office and Camden council. The corporation, which owns Hampstead Heath, has provided machinery and manpower to recreate the pond.
“Now, we should once again see those frogs,” said Anne-Marie O’Connor, chair of the RedFrog Association. “It’s a win-win. A wildlife pond like there was two centuries ago, particularly with so very many ponds in Britain having been lost from drying up or built on. And that view which Constable, himself a local resident, so loved.”