Branch Hill Pond, which was covered in during 1889 because of the building of a covered reservoir, can still be seen as a distinct hollow in the heath which is still grassland even now.
John Constable (1776-1837) came to Hampstead Heath in the late summer of 1819, seeking relief from urban London for his family of two children and his wife Maria who suffered from consumption. He rented a cottage at Upper Heath and at once began to paint the countryside; the uneven ground provided splendid viewpoints over the heath and toward London to the south.
By 1827 Constable had rented on a permanent basis a small four-story house at 40 Well Walk, Hampstead Heath. while still keeping a studio and minimum living space in London. He wrote Fisher that the drawing room of their new house situated on the high ground commanded “a view unequalled in Europe—from Westminster Abbey to Gravesend.”
It was there in 1827 that he painted an important oil of Branch Hill Pond. Hampstead Heath. From a raised vantage point we look past a high hillock on the right across Branch Hill Pond to Windsor Castle and the fields of Harrow in the distance. Amid the rising and falling ground, labourers and farmers go about their chores of digging and hauling sand or tending animals. Two men fill a two-wheeled cart with sand much in demand for London building. A figure urges three donkeys towards us around the shoulder of the hill. Tiny figures of bathers appear at the near edge of the pond at which a horse with rider drinks. A single figure with walking staff is seated above the sand diggers on the hill which partly conceals the roof and chimneys of a local architectural landmark known as the Salt Box.
In the distance to the left, a local thunderstorm showers an area beyond Windsor. Constable painted the broken ground’of the heath, its hillocks and hollows in all their roughness. He took great delight in capturing the weedy bank in the foreground with separate thick strokes of sandy brown and green over a warm underpaint.
John Constable’s view of Hampstead Heath