In A cottage in a cornfield c. 1816–17, Constable painted a cottage he often passed as a boy, on his way to school at Dedham. The cottage, at the end of Fen Lane, belonged to Peter Godfrey of Old Hall. One of his workmen probably lived in it. Constable painted two versions of this subject, based on the original pencil sketch. The first was painted mostly outdoors, at East Bergholt, and was started in the summer of 1815 and completed in 1833. This, the second version, was painted in his studio in London towards the end of 1816 or at the beginning of 1817. Constable made a number of changes to the drawing, adding a figure beside the cottage on the left, and the donkey and foal standing to the right of the gate. Throughout his life Constable copied the work of other artists, both as quick sketches and as finished copies. He copied artists as diverse as Cozens, Cuyp, Reynolds, Rubens, Titian, Willem van de Velde the younger and Richard Wilson. But the artists he copied most frequently were Claude Lorrain and seventeenth-century Dutch landscape artist Jacob van Ruisdael. In this painting Constable appears to have based his trees on those in Martino Rota’s engraving after Titian’s Martyrdom of St Peter Martyr, a work Constable greatly admired. Thus, even during a period when he was working close to nature, Constable combined elements from older artists in his paintings, in order to improve his composition. Activity • Visit the National Gallery of Australia’s Constable website nga.gov.au/Constable and find other works of art in the exhibition that are based on works by earlier artists.