Among the surviving drawings of John Constable there is one that contains a detail so small that most viewers would never notice it. Hidden within the sheet is a watermark: a crown above the initials “JC” enclosed within a double lozenge. At first glance it appears insignificant. Yet this modest mark opens an unexpected path through more than two centuries of papermaking history.
John Constable (1776–1837) occupies a unique place in British art. His paintings of the Stour Valley, the Suffolk countryside, and the ever-changing skies of southern England have become icons of nineteenth-century landscape painting. Before the finished canvases, however, came countless sketches made directly from nature. It is in these drawings that one often encounters Constable at his most immediate and observant, recording the world around him with remarkable freedom.
One such work, known as A River Landscape, depicts a cluster of tall trees beside a river, willow growth along the opposite bank, and the distant silhouette of a castle rising above the horizon. Scholars have suggested that the castle may be Framlingham Castle in Suffolk, a place well known to Constable from his youth.
The drawing formed part of the celebrated collection of Dr H. A. C. Gregory and was included in the Sotheby’s sale of that collection on 20 July 1949. The auction was regarded as a landmark event in the history of Constable collecting. In the introduction to the catalogue it was described as “probably the most important sale of Constable’s works that has ever taken place.” Gregory’s collection comprised 136 lots, including oil paintings, watercolours, sketches, and drawings, and reflected the discriminating eye of one of the most respected Constable collectors of his generation.
Yet for historians of paper, the most intriguing aspect of the drawing was not the landscape itself.
It was the paper.
Examination revealed a watermark identifying the sheet as the work of Joseph Coles, papermaker at Lower Wookey Mill in Somerset. As the catalogue recorded:
“The paper was made by Joseph Coles at Lower Wookey Mill, Somerset.”
The watermark belongs to the period around 1805–1815, when the mill was under Coles’s management. Other Constable drawings survive on paper from the same source. One example, A Figure on a Roadway (1806), bears the watermark “JOSEPH COLES / 1804.”
This was no isolated occurrence. Research by the paper historian Peter Bower has identified the watermarks of more than one hundred papermakers in Constable’s surviving drawings and correspondence. Like many artists of his generation, Constable used papers from a variety of sources, selecting them according to purpose and availability. Among them were sheets produced at Lower Wookey Mill.
Yet the history of Lower Wookey Mill did not end with the nineteenth century.
Many historic paper mills vanished during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, leaving behind little more than records and watermarks. Lower Wookey Mill followed a different path. Ownership changed, machinery evolved, and production methods adapted to new technologies, yet papermaking continued on the site.
In time, the mill became part of the enterprise known today as St Cuthberts Mill, one of Britain’s most respected producers of fine printing and artists’ papers.
It is there that Somerset paper is made.
To most readers, Somerset is simply the name printed on a sheet of paper. To anyone interested in the history of books, it represents something more remarkable: the survival of a place and a craft across more than two centuries.
Produced on traditional cylinder-mould machines, Somerset remains one of the best-known British papers used by artists, printmakers, and fine press printers. The paper itself is modern. It is not the paper on which Constable sketched beside English rivers two hundred years ago. Between his sketchbook and the present day lie generations of technical innovation, changing materials, and evolving methods of manufacture.
Yet the place survives, and with it a papermaking tradition whose history extends back to the early nineteenth century.
Printers, artists, and bookmakers who use Somerset paper today work within a tradition whose roots reach back to the years when Joseph Coles was making paper at Lower Wookey Mill.
Such stories remind us that a book consists of more than text, typography, and binding. Every element possesses a history of its own. Paper, perhaps more than any other component, tends to escape the reader’s attention. Yet it carries within it traces of landscapes, workshops, craftsmen, and traditions extending far beyond the printed page.
The reader handling a modern sheet of Somerset paper is unlikely to think of Joseph Coles, Lower Wookey Mill, or John Constable sketching beside an English river in the early years of the nineteenth century. Yet the connection remains.
A small watermark hidden within a drawing allows us to trace that thread across more than two centuries — from a Somerset paper mill, through the sketchbook of one of England’s greatest artists, to the work of printers and bookmakers today.
This is not continuity of product. It is continuity of workmanship.
The article is illustrated with John Constable’s A River Landscape (c. 1805–1815). A watermark preserved within the sheet enabled scholars to identify the paper as the work of Joseph Coles of Lower Wookey Mill, Somerset — a mill whose papermaking traditions continue today through St Cuthberts Mill. Image: Chiswick Auctions / PA.