| The painter C.R. Leslie is perhaps best known today as John Constable’s first biographer. His Memoirs of the Life of John Constable (1843), published six years after Constable’s death and largely based on Constable’s correspondence, set the tone for subsequent studies of his life and art for many years. This small portrait, almost a miniature in scale, was painted near the end of Constable’s life, probably as a private memento of friendship. However, since it was later engraved by David Lucas for the frontispiece to the first edition of Leslie’s biography, it has become the most enduring image of the great landscape painter’s personal 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. |
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