What was John Constable up to at 8.30am on 26 September 1814? If his sketchbook can be trusted, the great landscape painter was in Dedham Vale on the Essex-Suffolk border sketching the valley below, using quick pencil strokes to capture shadows in the foreground, trees in the middle distance and a faraway steeple breaching the cloud-dappled sky. Alongside the sketch, which he later used as the basis for his painting Stour Valley and Dedham Church, he noted the date and exact time he committed it to paper.
It’s this sense of immediacy, of peering over an artist’s shoulder as inspiration strikes, that makes flicking through sketchbooks so exciting, though the ideas are not always so fully formed. In his sketchbook from the 1880s, working on his series The Legend of the Briar Rose, Edward Burne-Jones tries out several arrangements of a knight and sleeping guards before arriving at a satisfactory composition.
