C. R. Leslie's influential biography of John Constable highlighted that his friend's artistic strengths stemmed from his unprecedented geographical "confinement." The unpublished draft preface, however, compared Constable with a "voyage of discovery." Attending to Leslie's conflicting images of confinement and remoteness enriches our understanding of how Constable's rhetorical preoccupation with the local was a response to his place within expanding global artistic, social, and economic networks. His conception of the English landscape was constructed against a background of exploration, colonization, and international commercial expansion, the negotiation of these realities animating his paintings, prints, and public theorizing.