Christie’s announces a follow-up to their success with John Constable’s The Lock, which sold for £9.1m in December, with a work expected to be in th £12-16m range:

A work of genius by John Constable, R.A. (1776-1837), the full-scale six-foot ‘sketch’ for View on the Stour near Dedham, circa 1821-22, will be offered in Christie’s Defining British Art sale in London on 30 June. The work, the last great six-footer sketch in private hands, clearly illustrates why Constable was considered the father of British Modernism and why the French painters, particularly the Impressionists, revered Constable as an instinctive painter of nature and the elements.