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Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s Grounds

1820

John Constable

Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada

Constable spent three weeks in Salisbury in September 1811 as the guest of the bishop, his old acquaintance Dr. John Fisher. It was on this visit that he formed the friendship with the bishop's nephew and namesake, John Fisher, which was to be one of the closest attachments of his life. Both on that first visit and during a brief stay on his return from his honeymoon in December 1816, Constable made some pencil drawings. The most productive of his visits, however, was the two-month holiday he spent with the younger Fishers whose house Leydenhall was in the cathedral close—in July and August 1820, accompanied by his wife and two children. He made many drawings of the cathedral city and its neighborhood, as well as a number of oil sketches. Fisher, who was, as has been mentioned above, an amateur artist, lent him painting materials, including canvases, which enabled Constable to make his open-air sketches on a larger scale than usual. When writing to thank Fisher for his hospitality Constable remarked: "My Salisbury sketches are much liked — that in the palace grounds—the bridges — & your house from the meadows—the moat--&c.” This sketch is probably "that in the palace grounds." It is certainly the picture to which the bishop's elder daughter, Dolly, referred when she wrote to Constable on October 8, 1820: "Papa desires me to say, he hopes you will finish for the Exhibition the view you took from our Garden of the Cathedral by the water side." It took Constable another two and a half years to complete this commission. For the exhibited picture of 1823 (now in the Victoria and Albert Museum) and the later versions of 1823 and 1826, see the entry for No. 34. This is the original sketch on which all those paintings are based. X-ray examination has shown that Constable started the sketch as a vertical composition, with the canvas at right angles to its present direction.

From Graham Reynolds, Constable’s England (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1983), p. 98.