The portfolio For John Constable was published by the Bernard Jacobson Gallery in 1976 in an edition of 100, to coincide with the Tate’s major Constable exhibition that year. Bernard Jacobson commissioned 19 artists to contribute a print to the portfolio.
Several of the artists chose to respond directly to individual works (or series of works) by Constable in the V&A collection. Ivor Abrahams (born 1935) offers a fluent painterly response to the full-scale sketch for The Leaping Horse (V&A 986-1900). His interpretation emphasises the characteristics picked out by the Redgraves in their description of the painting published in 1866: “The subjects are laid on with the knife, with great breadth…The trees are masses of green…but no indication of leafage.” Abrahams, a sculptor as well as a printmaker, was fascinated by man-made landscapes, as exemplified here by the pollarded willow and the bridge and flood-gate.