Gainsborough, Constable, and Turner

The Manton Collection

June 15–November 11, 2007

John Constable

The Wheatfield

Oil on canvas, 20 1/2 x 29 1/2 in. Gift of the Manton Foundation in memory of Sir Edwin and Lady Manton

The works of art on display in this exhibition are drawn from one of the most important private collections of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British art assembled in recent decades. Created by Sir Edwin A. G. Manton, a business leader and arts patron who died in 2005 at the age of 96, the collection is particularly rich in the works of John Constable, the leading painter of the English countryside in the first half of the nineteenth century and one of the great landscapists of the Romantic movement. The collection features several of his finished oil paintings, a rich and varied group of oil studies, and numerous watercolors and drawings. In addition, there is a strong representation of small paintings, watercolors, chalk drawings, and prints by J.M.W. Turner, Thomas Gainsborough, and other leading British artists. 

The 2007 gift of this magnificent collection from the Manton Foundation constitutes the most significant acquisition of art to the Clark since its founding in 1955. The Manton Collection—with its in-depth focus on major artists within a particular school and period—resonates with Sterling and Francine Clark’s own collecting sensibility and perfectly complements the Clark’s outstanding holdings of nineteenth-century French and American paintings and works on paper.