Salisbury Cathedral from Meadows: Grief and Divinity
“the sound of water escaping from mill dams; willows; old rotten planks; slimy posts; and brickwork I love such things…”
-John Constable [1]
When Constable revealed his painting, The Hay Wain, at the Royal Academy in France in 1824, “his strikingly fresh, apparently spontaneous transcription of the landscape, described by the French writer Stendhal as ‘the mirror of nature,’ caused a sensation among French painters.” [2] In 1802 when Constable first displayed his artwork at the Academy, the dominant form of European artwork was based on classicism and historicism. [3] The goal of paintings was idealized versions that displayed virtuous subjects and impressive draftsmanship. The antecedent to the French Romantics, Constable’s focus on the shifting weather, rural labor, and personal impressions of his native Suffolk paved the way for the rejection of an academic style of painting. Despite his influence, Constable was not met with financial success and relied on the patronage of his friend Bishop of Salisbury and his nephew the Archdeacon both named John Fisher. [4] When the love of his life and father of his seven children, Maria died in 1829, Archdeacon Fisher invited him to stay in Salisbury and suggested he paint “the church under a cloud”. [5] The resultant 1831 painting Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, encapsulated his grief as well as his devotion to his faith. “Constable rarely painted subjects that did not endear themselves to him as a result of his upbringing or because of friendship or association. Salisbury Cathedral became one of his principal themes.” [6] Constable’s oeuvre consistently represents landscapes of profound personal importance to him and Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows is his magnum opus of emotion and faith.
Constable had visited and created many preparatory sketches of Salisbury, (Fig 2.) as well as paintings from several viewing points before his visit in 1929 following Maria’s death. The 1831 piece combines several elements into its final composition. St. Thomas church on the left side of the cathedral, for example, cannot be viewed from this vantage point in real life. Above the spire of the Gothic cathedral, is a sky suffused with lightning and gloomy storm clouds. Below it, a man in a horse-drawn buggy, traversing the river Nadder. A sheepdog looks on from shore. Above the church spire transecting the clouds is a rainbow ending at Leadenhall, his friend Archdeacon Fisher’s home. The large ash tree, a symbol of resurrection, nearest the church hosts an elder bush beneath it, identifiable by its white blossoms.[7] Each of these elements holds a distinct meaning and the cohesion creates an intimate portrayal of his beloved homeland.
Built in the 13th century, Salisbury Cathedral has survived several iterations of restorations and the taste for Gothic revival had come back into vogue in the 18th century. It was the site of contention leading up to the Great Reform Act of 1832 and the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 which Fisher and Constable were both critical of, which allowed Catholics to sit in Parliament. [8] The Cathedral personifies the changing political and religious tastes of the English. Centuries of redevelopment and reconstruction of the Cathedral led to the 18th-century version depicted in Constable’s work “which involved clearing away a good deal of its medieval, Catholic fabric and fashioning a more modern-looking, conspicuously Protestant appearance.” [9] Constable was a political conservative as well as a religious man whose faith was steeped in his Anglican faith. His work is strongly aligned with the experience of what the Romantics called the sublime. He even wrote to his wife Maria about his thoughts on the written philosophy of the sublime. When he used the term in his writings it was always in connection to a religious or spiritual theme. [10] By all indications Constable was a man who saw God’s handiwork in the order of the natural world if he would stop of observe it. [11] The church serves as a foil to the natural experiences around him, grounding the painting in reverence of the natural forces. Constable, “was one of many observers concerned with the place of the Anglican Church in the changing world of the nineteenth century, and with the political as well as ecclesiastical meaning of landscape.” [12] His political and religious affiliations lend themselves to a contemplation of the role of the church in his native Suffolk as well as his personal faith in the face of grief.
Constable’s observation and treatment of the clouds and sky run deep in his painting practice. Writing to Archdeacon Fisher Constable mused that “The landscape painter who does not make his skies a very material part of his composition neglects to avail himself of one of his greatest aids.”[13] He took to a practice he dubbed “skying,” in which he painstakingly sketched clouds, often including meteorological notes on the back (Fig 3). He owned and annotated his copy of Thomas Forster’s 1815 “Researches about Atmospheric Phaenomena” which included detailed information on meteorological phenomena. [14] His notations, written correspondence, and emphasis of realistic clouds “suggest that Constable saw clouds instead as indices of larger aerial movements of matter and energy, situated in a continuum of marked time and spatial extension.” [15] The aesthetic and emotional value of Salisbury Cathedral owes much to the dark and dramatic clouds he has chosen to depict.
When the painting was first exhibited at the Royal Academy he chose nine lines from the Scottish poet James Thompson’s poem The Four Seasons: Summer (1727) to accompany it. The poem concerns the myth of a young couple who, while on a walk through the woods during a rainstorm, Amelia is struck by lightning and dies in her lover Celadon’s arms. [16] Constable’s work shifted in the wake of Maria’s death. “His art was already progressing from the serenity of its earlier phase to a more broken and accented style. ” [17] His use of a palette knife creates dramatic impasto while his attentiveness to the clouds and rainbow derive levity. His experience of grief is transformed through the channel that he is most familiar with. The elder bush below the ash tree was a favorite plant of Constable’s but also to him an “emblem of death.” [18] In the bosom of his friend Fisher’s home, he is able to transmute his range of emotions onto canvas. One of the latest additions to the painting is the arching rainbow which lands in Fisher’s home, who passed away four days after the initial exhibition. [19] The rainbow is perhaps an allusion to the afterlife, hope in the reunion of eternity after mortal tasks are done. Salisbury Cathedral is an ode to his lost love as well as the faith and friendship that buoyed him in its wake.
Constable is often remembered as a landscape painter yet his works always contain something human in them. Geography professor Rees says, “his subject was not nature as such but rather the settled English countryside. With the exception of his sky studies, landscapes that showed little sign of a human presence had no appeal for him.” [20] He includes minute details that create a sense of realism and pride in the humble workings of rural life. His vignettes of the farmworkers in the cart are in contrast to the beginnings of industrial work he would have been privy to on his trips to London. Parliamentary acts threatened not only his conservative religious beliefs but also the countryside as he knew it. “The Enclosure Acts of 1773 and 1801 massively impacted rural life in Britain. These acts enabled landowners to fence off land and remove the right of commoners to access to it.” [21] The way of life that he depicts so fondly was under threat of change during his lifetime.
Constable aimed, in the Romantic fashion, to depict realistic paintings that are based on observation and the senses rather than on previous artworks.[22] “In a letter to fellow painter Charles Leslie he said, ‘my limited and abstracted art is to be found under every hedge, and in every lane, and therefore nobody thinks it worth picking up.’”[23] He took note and included those sundry details. The strong impression that his work created was influential to many of the French Romantics to follow, especially Delacroix and the Barbizon school. Though perhaps not fully symbolic, the piece is certainly autobiographical. According to his companion and biographer Charles Leslie, Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows contains “the fullest impression of the compass of his art.” [24] From the resolute cathedral to the storming clouds that are certain to pass soon, and the diligent rural worker, Salisbury epitomizes Constable’s influence.
Works Cited
Amstutz, Nina. “Landscape and the Architecture of Light; John Constable’s Clouds at the Yale Center for British Art.” Journal of the History of Collections 30, no. 1 (2018): 167–78. https://doi.org/10.1093/jhc/fhx005.
Barker, Elizabeth E. “John Constable (1776–1837).” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/jcns/hd_jcns.htm
Brown, David Blayney. “Gothic Cathedrals from Romanticism to Modernism: Images and Ideas.” Tate Papers, no. 33 (2020). https://www.tate.org.uk/research/tate-papers/33/gothic-cathedrals-romanticism-modernism-images-ideas
“Constable’s Salisbury” Tate. Accessed October 6, 2023. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/constable-salisbury-cathedral-from-the-meadows-t13896/in-depth-salisbury-cathedral-from-the-meadows/constables-salisbury
Daniels, Stephen. “‘ No Continuing City’: John Constable, John Britton, and View of Urban History.’ Tate Papers, no. 33 (2020). https://www.tate.org.uk/research/tate-papers/33/no-continuing-city-john-constable-john-britton-views-urban-history
Hayes, John. British Paintings of the Sixteenth through Nineteenth Centuries. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. Washington, D.C., 1992: 27–29.
Leslie, C. R. The Memoirs of the Life John Constable Esq., RA.: Composed Chiefly of his Letters. (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1845) https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=UXc4AAAAMAAJ&pg=GBS.PA314&hl=en
Lyles, Anne. ‘Sublime Nature: John Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows’, in Nigel Llewellyn and Chrstine Riding (eds.), The Art of the Sublime, Tate Research Publication, January 2013, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/the-sublime/anne-lyles-sublime-nature-john-constables-salisbury-cathedral-from-the-meadows-r1129550.
Myrone, Felicity. “Subjects and Meanings in Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows.” Tate Papers, no. 33 (2020). https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/constable-salisbury-cathedral-from-the-meadows-t13896/in-depth-salisbury-cathedral-from-the-meadows/subjects-meaning
Rees, Ronald. “John Constable and the Art of Geography.” Geographical Review 66, no. 1 (1976): 59–72. https://doi.org/10.2307/213315.
Reynolds, Graham, and John Constable. Constable’s England. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1983.
Robbins, Nicholas. “John Constable, Luke Howard, and the Aesthetics of Climate.” The Art Bulletin (New York, N.Y.) 103, no. 2 (2021): 50–76. https://doi.org/10.1080/00043079.2021.1847578.
[1] Myrone, Felicity. “Subjects and Meanings in Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows.” Tate Papers, no. 33 (2020).
[2] Barker, Elizabeth E. “John Constable (1776–1837).” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/jcns/hd_jcns.htm
[3] Hayes, John. British Paintings of the Sixteenth through Nineteenth Centuries. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. Washington, D.C., 1992: 27–29.
[4] Daniels, Stephen. “‘ No Continuing City’: John Constable, John Britton, and View of Urban History.’ Tate Papers, no. 33 (2020).
[5] “Constable’s Salisbury” Tate. Accessed October 6, 2023. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/constable-salisbury-cathedral-from-the-meadows-t13896/in-depth-salisbury-cathedral-from-the-meadows/constables-salisbury
[6] Hayes, John. British Paintings of the Sixteenth through Nineteenth Centuries.
[7] Myrone, Felicity. “Subjects and Meanings in Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows.”
[8] Myrone, Felicity. “Subjects and Meanings in Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows.”
[9] Daniels, Stephen. “‘ No Continuing City’: John Constable, John Britton, and View of Urban History.’
[10] Lyles, Anne. “Sublime Nature: John Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows,: in Nigel Llewellyn and Chrstine Riding (eds.), The Art of the Sublime, Tate Research Publication, January 2013, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/the-sublime/anne-lyles-sublime-nature-john-constables-salisbury-cathedral-from-the-meadows-r1129550
[11] Rees, Ronald. “John Constable and the Art of Geography.” Geographical Review 66, no. 1 (1976): 59–72. https://doi.org/10.2307/213315.
[12] Daniels, Stephen. “‘ No Continuing City’: John Constable, John Britton, and View of Ubran History.’ Tate Papers, no. 33 (2020)
[13] Myrone, Felicity. “Subjects and Meanings in Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows.”
[14] Amstutz, Nina. “Landscape and the Architecture of Light; John Constable’s Clouds at the Yale Center for British Art.” Journal of the History of Collections 30, no. 1 (2018): 167–78. https://doi.org/10.1093/jhc/fhx005.
[15] Robbins, Nicholas. “John Constable, Luke Howard, and the Aesthetics of Climate.” The Art Bulletin (New York, N.Y.) 103, no. 2 (2021): 50–76. https://doi.org/10.1080/00043079.2021.1847578.
[16] Myrone, Felicity. “Subjects and Meanings in Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows.”
[17] Reynolds, Graham, and John Constable. Constable’s England. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1983.
[18] Myrone, Felicity. “Subjects and Meanings in Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows.”
[19] IBID
[20] Rees, Ronald. “John Constable and the Art of Geography.”
[21]Myrone, Felicity. “Subjects and Meanings in Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows.”
[22] Rees, Ronald. “John Constable and the Art of Geography.”
[23] Myrone, Felicity. “Subjects and Meanings in Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows.”
[24] Leslie, C. R. The Memoirs of the Life John Constable Esq., RA.: Composed Chiefly of his Letters. 203. (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1845) https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=UXc4AAAAMAAJ&pg=GBS.PA314&hl=en