Throughout his working life, Constable copied the work of earlier landscape artists – as quick sketches and in facsimile. He copied artists as diverse as Cozens, Cuyp, and Rubens. The artists he copied most frequently were the seventeenth-century landscape artists Claude Lorrain (1604/5–82) and Jacob van Ruisdael (1628/9–82).

Constable sought ideas about pictorial approach and composition from earlier landscape artists – but only those ideas that didn’t conflict with his avowed intent to paint from nature.