The Real Timeline of a Masterpiece

My husband and I ducked into the Victoria and Albert Museum on a rainy day in London a few years ago. A line wound around the lobby for a Chanel fashion exhibition, but we slipped past and headed upstairs to find the two things I was looking for.

In our laundry room hangs a print of The Way Wain by John Constable (1821). I found it at a garage sale 15 years ago and grabbed it without knowing the painting or artist. I’ve grown to love it exponentially more as I’ve read about John Constable and his work in the years since.

At the Victoria and Albert hangs not the final Hay Wain, but his original to-scale draft that he completed before painting the actual piece, a glimpse of the hours of work he put in leading up to the final masterpiece. Somehow, I was drawn to the draft more than the completed work. You could feel that the artist was just a person, still practicing.

Nearby, in a befittingly cozy passageway hung several Beatrix Potter originals, paintings that my children and I have seen so often in our well-loved copies of Peter Rabbit, Mrs. Tittlemouse, Jeremy Fisher, and the whole bunch. But what I loved most of all were the early sketches.

I purchased a print of a pencil sketch of Mother Rabbit and her children to hang at home beside a copy of the real thing seen in The Tale of Peter Rabbit, a little reminder that in our house there’s a lot of praying, planning, and messing up on the way to the finished product.

More often than not, our days look like a sketchbook, full of eraser marks, rewrites, prayers. Masterpieces might be our final point on the timeline but the beautiful work often comes in the perseverance and diligence leading there.