Constable painted this watercolour at a sad time in his life. Both his wife, Maria, and his closest friend, John Fisher, had died, and his two eldest sons had left home. He is perhaps expressing his personal unhappiness in the watercolour, for the image is certainly a melancholy one. The painting was exhibited in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of 1836. Some of the lines that accompanied this painting in the catalogue describe ‘The mysterious monument of Stonehenge, standing remote on a bare and boundless heath…’. Constable himself probably wrote them. e61d0d55-d5df-4da4-9786-47210a3e1986 (1)