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
