28/02/2017

Meteorologist sheds new light on famous Constable painting once exhibited in Suffolk





History may have to be rewritten according to a meteorologist who claims the most striking feature of a famous Constable painting – a rainbow – may have been added in afterwards. 

Professor John Thornes from the University of Birmingham argued that the feature, seen in Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, was painted in to reflect the artist’s grief over his best friend’s death at a special talk laid on by the Salisbury Museum.

John Constable’s close friend John Fisher died on the afternoon of August 25, 1832 – but the original painting was first exhibited in 1831.

Professor Thornes’ findings explain how a re-assessment of the solar geometry of the painting, and Constable’s understanding of contemporary rainbow theory, suggest that the rainbow was added in at a later date as a homage to Mr Fisher.

The end of the rainbow can even be seen to rest on Mr Fisher’s house, where Constable stayed during his visits to Salisbury.



The painting was first exhibited by Constable in 1831 at the Royal Academy. The depicted rainbow is totally out of place considering the solar geometry of the scene – the implied position of the sun in the sky.
Art historians have suggested that perhaps the rainbow was added just before the painting was exhibited to symbolise hope, as the storm threatening the cathedral – and by implication the Church of England – was nearly over. But the solar geometry tells a different story. The depicted rainbow rests on John Fisher’s house, the home of Constable’s best friend, where he had often stayed.
Careful examination of the rainbow shows that it is a full rainbow, which would have been possible on the afternoon of August 25, 1832, the day when Fisher unexpectedly died.

It is now clear that when the painting was first exhibited at the Royal Academy it did not contain a rainbow. Indeed, none of the many critics describing the picture mention a rainbow. Constable therefore added the rainbow sometime after his best friend had died as a remarkable tribute to him. It is impossible to know exactly when Constable did this but it is likely to have been early in 1834 before he exhibited the painting in Birmingham that September. In July 1834, he wrote to a friend:

           I have done wonders with my great Salisbury – I have been preparing it for [exhibition in] Birmingham, and I am sure I have much increased its power and effect – and I have no doubt of this picture being my best now.





                                                       




Constable believed that painting was a science, and should be pursued as an enquiry into the laws of nature: “Why then may not landscape painting be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments.”

Constable studied the accepted physics of rainbows at the time, which enabled him to create the remarkable rainbow in Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows. He wrote elsewhere: “We see nothing truly till we understand it.”

However, he was quite happy to introduce an inconsistent symbolic rainbow in this painting, which is why it is important we understand the history of the painting as well as the solar geometry.


Yet success had come late to Constable, who often struggled to support a large family (his wife Maria bore seven children before she died in 1828). Throughout the 1810s and 1820s, Constable supplemented his income by painting portraits  of local dignitaries. The patronage of Dr. John Fisher, whom Constable first met in 1798 and who later became bishop of Salisbury, remained crucial throughout his career. Between 1811 and 1829, Constable often visited the Reverend Fisher at Salisbury, where he sketched the Gothic cathedral  from a range of viewpoints under various weather conditions. These preliminary oil studies served as the basis of several paintings that picture Salisbury Cathedral alternately menaced by storms, framed by puffy cumulous clouds, or surmounted by a rainbow.

                                                                           


Intensive studies of clouds and skies enabled Constable to achieve these unique atmospheric effects. In 1821 and 1822, during his intense “skying” period, he produced dozens of watercolor
, crayon, and oil studies of the clouds over Hampstead Heath . His cloud studies—celebrated today—were not exhibited in his lifetime. Painted rapidly, wet-in-wet, Constable used short strokes and a restricted color palette to train his hand and eye, and to enhance the realism of his later paintings. He labeled almost all of these images with scientific precision, indicating the date, time, wind, and weather conditions under which they were painted. Yet his ultimate goal was to paint the sky—which he deemed landscape’s “chief organ of sentiment”—more expressively. Indeed, landscapes from the time of his wife’s death (e.g., Hadleigh Castle, 1828–29; Tate, London) feature dark, turbulent skiesthat carry the brunt of the works’ emotional weight.




Sublime Nature: John Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows by  Anne Lyles


 Tate


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