Artnews_A previously unknown sketch by John Constable, one of the great English landscape masters, sold for £320,000 (around $415,000) at auction after being held in a private collection for the better part of a century.

Just 15 inches wide,Dedham Vale looking towards Langham is believed to have been painted by Constable between 1809 and 1814. It wasestimated to fetch £150,000 to £200,000 ($194,500 to $260,000) and when it went under the hammer in a sale of British, European, and sporting art at Tennants Auctioneers in North Yorkshire on March 15.

The work came to market from the collection of a family in Yorkshire area. Anne Durning Holt (1899–1980) is thought to have bought the painting on the open market, and it’s been in the Holt clan ever since.

“It’s not every day that a work by Constable comes to auction,” said Jane Tennant, director and auctioneer, in a phone interview. “It was always known in the Holt family to be by Constable, but what’s interesting is that it hasn’t previously been recorded in the literature. But as we have seen time and time again, that’s what makes the art world interesting!”

The sketch shows the countryside surrounding Constable’s childhood home of East Bergholt, on the border between Suffolk and Essex counties, and was executed on-site. Constable’s prosperous father owned tracts of land in the area.

Constable often drew on such sketches when creating canvases for exhibition in his studio, sometimes calling on examples from years before. In an essay on Tennant’s website, art historian Anne Lyles points out that Constable used this sketch as the basis for the paintingDedham Vale(c. 1825), in Germany’s Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen Neue Pinakothek in Munich. His ambitious treatments of everyday landscapes at a scale previously reserved for historical and religious subjects would prove revolutionary, strongly influencing artists like Claude Monet and Vincent van Gogh.