Following the death of his parents in 1815 and 1816, and his marriage to Maria Bicknell soon afterward, John Constable became permanently based in London. Thereafter, he made only occasional visits to Suffolk. However, in the second half of his career, he began to paint other English locations instead, mainly ones associated with family or friends. Hampstead, to the north of London, for example, began to feature in his landscape paintings when, from 1819, he began to rent lodgings there—away from the pollution of central London, and at that time just a small village—for the benefit of Maria’s health. Then, when her tubercular condition worsened and the doctors advised sea air, Constable arranged for the family to make a number of extended stays in Brighton, on the Sussex coast, between 1824 and 1828. As a result, Constable began to add marine and coastal subjects to his landscape repertoire.

In fact, Constable had shown an interest in recording sailing vessels from an early age. His father, Golding, was a coal merchant, as well as a corn miller, and owned a number of sailing vessels for carrying his cargoes by sea between Mistley—on the estuary of the River Stour—and the port of London. In his early career, Constable sometimes drew or painted these seagoing vessels and other boats that he saw along the banks of the River Orwell near Ipswich. He even made a group of drawings of vessels that he observed on open waters in the estuaries of the rivers Thames and Medway when, in 1803, he spent a few weeks on board an East India merchant ship. Moreover, before visiting Brighton in the 1820s, Constable had made sketches of the coast at Osmington near Weymouth in Dorset where he and Maria had spent their honeymoon, in 1816, staying with his great friend John Fisher. However, it was at Brighton in the 1820s that Constable ventured into his most sustained engagement with coastal art.

By the 1820s, Brighton, once a small fishing port, had become a busy and fashionable resort. It was increasingly accessible thanks to a good coach service from London, and visitors were attracted by its sea-bathing and by the association of the town with the Prince Regent, who had recently refashioned the Brighton Pavilion in an exotic Orientalist style. Constable initially claimed to dislike Brighton. Not long after first settling in his family there in 1824, he described it to Fisher as “the receptacle of the fashion and offscouring of London,” and the beach itself as “only Piccadilly by the seaside.”¹ No doubt the crowded and noisy beach at Brighton would have compared unfavorably with the deserted, hidden coves near Osmington, which the two men had explored together some eight years earlier. Gradually, however, Constable began to adapt to his new surroundings. He sought out quieter sections of the beach, especially at nearby Hove, a little further to the west, where Coal Brigs and Fishing Vessels on the Beach at Hove appears to have been drawn. In these more peaceful locations he would make striking oil sketches of the sea and sky, or drawings and colored studies of vessels on the shoreline, enjoying the pictorial contrast between the verticals of their masts and sails with the horizontals of the sea and beach.

Coal Brigs and Fishing Vessels on the Beach at Hove would originally have been drawn by Constable in a sketchbook. Very few of his sketchbooks, however, remain intact. Nevertheless, their likely contents can often be “reconstructed” by notionally assembling individual paper sheets of similar subject matter and size—albeit some sheets may have lesser dimensions than those of the original book if they were subsequently cut down. For example, Graham Reynolds suggested that this sheet, Coal Brigs and Fishing Vessels, probably came from a sketchbook originally measuring about 7 1/8 x 10 1/4 inches (18 x 26 cm), which Constable had first used in 1823 for making drawings in Wiltshire and Leicestershire and then took up again the following year in Brighton.² The likely contents of this sketchbook have recently been examined again, in more detail, by Ian Warrell, who similarly believes it originally contained the sheet Coal Brigs and Fishing Vessels, though he posits that it was drawn on a half sheet.³ Indeed, Warrell links this drawing to three others by Constable depicting coal brigs and likely to be from this sketchbook, suggesting that, together, they form a sequence.⁴

Being a fast-growing resort, Brighton depended for fuel on regular supplies of coal delivered by sea in brigs (or “colliers”) that sailed from the ports of Newcastle and Sunderland in the north of England. Since the nearest natural harbor was situated five miles to the west of Brighton, at Shoreham, these vessels had to put into Brighton’s shore at high water, and then they beached as the tide receded. Unloading would begin as soon as the receding tide made it possible to bring horses and carts alongside them. Constable’s interest in these vessels no doubt partly arose from the fact that his father had also been involved in the coal trade, so they would have prompted memories of his childhood.  

However, in making these drawings of shipping on the beach at Brighton, Constable may well have had yet another motive in mind. For, in December 1824, he confided to Fisher that the French dealer John Arrowsmith had commissioned him to produce twelve designs of shipping subjects, apparently to be selected from this particular sketchbook, to be engraved in London and then published in Paris. It seems likely that this proposed publishing project had first been discussed between Constable and Arrowsmith earlier in the year, when the two men were in regular communication. For, early in 1824, Arrowsmith had purchased two of Constable’s “six-footers” (wide exhibition canvases) of River Stour subjects, The Hay Wain (1821, National Gallery, London) and View on the Stour near Dedham (1822, The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino). Moreover, as Arrowsmith intended to exhibit these paintings at the Paris Salon that summer, the two men needed to discuss arrangements for their transport to the French capital—as well as perhaps the artist’s progress on four additional small paintings that Arrowsmith had commissioned from Constable in May. Whether Constable ever intended to use this particular drawing, Coal Brigs and Fishing Vessels, for Arrowsmith’s proposed publishing project is not known, as the commission never materialized.

What is known, however, is that Constable did consult the drawing of Coal Brigs and Fishing Vessels when planning a large oil of this same subject. For, in 2017, a large compositional oil study by Constable measuring some 32 1/4 x 44 inches (82 x 112 cm)—previously unknown to Constable scholars—was discovered in France (fig. 28.1), very closely based on the drawing in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.⁵ The painting seems to have been intended by Constable as a preparatory oil study for another picture that he intended to start of the same subject, probably on a similar scale.⁶ Underneath the surface of the paint, one can just make out the indications of a squared pencil grid, indicating that the composition was “squared up” by Constable (or by his studio assistant, John Dunthorne the younger) from the drawing in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. It is possible that the preparatory oil painting was made in connection with another commission from John Arrowsmith, especially when one bears in mind that the latter had enquired in December 1824 about Constable’s progress on a “Brighton Sea Piece.”⁷ Alternatively, the oil painting may represent an abandoned idea for one of Constable’s large Royal Academy exhibits, especially as he did eventually paint and exhibit a Brighton beach subject in 1827: Chain Pier, Brighton, now in Tate Britain. Interestingly, that painting features a distinctive orange sail on the far left, similar to the one in the oil painting derived from the Houston drawing.

Coal Brigs and Fishing Vessels was once owned by the distinguished collector of drawings Sir Bruce Ingram (1877–1963). Ingram was a journalist by profession, best known as the editor for many years of the Illustrated London News. As a collector, he was particularly interested in acquiring drawings by marine artists, forming a collection of some three thousand examples, the majority of which were by Dutch artists. —Anne Lyles