Constable depicted this subject many times. In his 1813 sketchbook he made three drawings of the cottage – one from the same point of view, and two from the opposite direction. Two years later, around 1815,  he made this drawing in a sketchbook that was subsequently broken up. And he made two paintings of the scene, including A cottage in a cornfield c.1816–17  .

He wrote to Maria Bicknell on 27 August 1815: ‘I live almost wholly in the feilds and see nobody but the harvest men. The weather has been uncommonly fine though we have had some very high winds that have disconcerted the foliage a great deal’ (Beckett II, p. 149).

Leslie Parris and Ian Fleming-Williams observed that 1815 was a year of good weather andabundant corn harvests, which may also have influenced Constable’s choice of subject (Tate 1991, p. 421)