Constable painted this view from Hampstead Heath looking west to Harrow many times. Here he captured a spectacular view of the setting sun, using thick brush and palette-knife strokes of strong colour. As Sarah Cove has noted, he adopted a new colour of ground to paint on, a cool mid-blue, which lowered the overall tonality of the painting ‘giving an almost ethereal quality to the light’ (Sarah Cove, ‘Very great difficulty in composition and execution’, in F. Bancroft (ed.), Constable’s Skies, New York: Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, 2004, p. 133). Constable omitted to provide details about the wind direction, which he had included in many of his 1821 and 1822 cloud studies.