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We look across an expanse of a flat, grassy lawn at the towering spire of a stone church outlined against billowing clouds in this horizontal landscape painting. The lawn is dappled with light filtering through a line of trees with thick, green canopies to our left. The trees take up almost the left half of the composition, and they line a dirt path where three people walk. Tiny in scale, the people are painted with strokes of slate blue, red, white, and black. A few animals, perhaps cows, graze on the lawn near more trees on the far side of the green. Beyond the trees, the church sits on the horizon, which comes about a quarter of the way up the composition. Miniscule touches of yellow, black, and red may suggest more people in the deep distance. The pale blue sky is nearly filled with puffy parchment-white and mauve-tinged clouds.

John Constable

Salisbury Cathedral from Lower Marsh Close, 1820

West Building, Main Floor — Gallery 57

Medium

oil on canvas

Dimensions

overall: 73 x 91 cm (28 3/4 x 35 13/16 in.)

framed: 97.1 x 115.6 x 10.7 cm (38 1/4 x 45 1/2 x 4 3/16 in.)

Credit Line

Andrew W. Mellon Collection

Accession Number

1937.1.108

Artists / Makers

John Constable (artist) British, 1776 - 1837

Image Use

This image is in the public domain.
Read our full Open Access policy for images .

Provenance

Unsold by the artist; (John Constable sale, Messrs. Foster, London, 15-16 May 1838, 2nd day, no. 13, with Glebe Farm); bought by William Hooker Carpenter; (his sale, Christie, Manson & Woods, London, 16 February 1867, no. 77); bought by Halsted. Sir John Kelk, Bt. [1816-1886], Tedworth, Wiltshire; (sale, Christie, Manson & Woods, London, 11 March 1899, no. 6); bought by (Thomas Agnew & Sons, London); sold the same day to (Messrs. Lawrie & Co., London); purchased 11 November 1901 by (M. Knoedler & Co., New York); sold 26 January 1903 to (Arthur Tooth & Son, New York); purchased by William K. Bixby, St. Louis, Missouri;[1] sold 8 May 1918 to (M. Knoedler & Co., New York); purchased April 1918[2] by Andrew W. Mellon, Pittsburgh; deeded to The A.W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust, Pittsburgh; gift 1937 to NGA.

[1] Bixby lent the painting to a 1911 exhibition at the City Art Museum in St. Louis.

[2] The foregoing information was kindly supplied by M. Knoedler & Co., New York, from its stock books. The discrepancy between Bixby's sale of the picture to Knoedler's on 8 May 1918 and Mellon's purchase of it in April is presumably to be explained by Mellon's prior knowledge of the intended consignment.

Associated Names

Agnew & Sons, Ltd., Thomas
Bixby, William K.
Carpenter, William Hooker
Christie, Manson & Woods, Ltd.
Constable, John
Foster, Messrs.
Halsted
Kelk, Bt., John William, Sir
Knoedler & Company, M.
Knoedler & Company, M.
Lawrie & Co., Messrs.
Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust, The A.W.
Mellon, Andrew W.
Tooth & Sons, Ltd., Arthur

Exhibition History

1911: "The Home Exhibiton:" A Collection of Paintings owned in St. Louis, City Art Museum, St. Louis, 1911, no. 15, repro.

1991: Constable, Tate Gallery, London, 1991, no. 136, repro.

2002: Constable Le Choix de Lucian Freud, Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, 2002-2003, no. 168, repro.

2007: Loan for display with permanent collection, Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati, 2007-2008.

Technical Summary

The medium-fine canvas is plain woven; it has been lined. The top of the canvas has been cut down and folded over and later torn off, and the top inch of the picture is on a separate fabric strip which has been painted subsequently (this in turn has been folded over). The ground is white, of moderate thickness. There is a thin streaky brown imprimatura. The painting is executed sketchily, leaving large areas of the imprimatura revealed, and worked with impasto and scrubbing; the paint layers in much of the landscape are blended wet into wet, with many of the smaller details added as dabs of paint over a dried underlayer. The impasto has been flattened during lining. Repainting in the sky at upper right and along the bottom edge center was adjusted in 1948. The moderately thick natural resin varnish has discolored yellow to a significant degree.

Bibliography

1941: Preliminary Catalogue of Paintings and Sculpture. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1941: 43, no. 108, as A View of Salisbury Cathedral.

1942: Book of Illustrations. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1942: 241, repro. 13, as A View of Salisbury Cathedral.

1949: Paintings and Sculpture from the Mellon Collection. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1949 (reprinted 1953 and 1958): 122, repro., as A View of Salisburg Cathedral.

1952: Cairns, Huntington, and John Walker, eds., Great Paintings from the National Gallery of Art. New York, 1952: 142, color repro., as A View of Salisbury Cathedral.

1960: Cooke, Hereward Lester. British Painting in the National Gallery of Art. Washington, D.C., 1960 (Booklet Number Eight in Ten Schools of Painting in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.): 34, color repro., as A View of Salisbury Cathedral.

1963: Walker, John. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. New York, 1963 (reprinted 1964 in French, German, and Spanish): 322, repro., as A View of Salisbury Cathedral.

1965: Reynolds, Graham. Constable: The Natural Painter. London, 1965: 141, pl. 38.

1965: Summary Catalogue of European Paintings and Sculpture. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1965: 29, as A View of Salisbury Cathedral.

1966: Cairns, Huntington, and John Walker, eds. A Pageant of Painting from the National Gallery of Art. 2 vols. New York, 1966: 2:366, color repro., as A View of Salisbury Cathedral.

1968: Cooke, Hereward Lester. Paintings Lessons from the Great Masters. London, 1968: 178, repro., color repro. opposite.

1968: Gandolfo, Giampaolo et al. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Great Museums of the World. New York, 1968: 149-150, color repro.

1968: National Gallery of Art. European Paintings and Sculpture, Illustrations. Washington, 1968: 22, repro., as A View of Salisbury Cathedral.

1975: European Paintings: An Illustrated Summary Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1975: 72, repro.

1975: Walker, John. National Gallery of Art, Washington. New York, 1975: no. 595, color repro.

1976: Whittingham, Selby. Constable and Turner at Salisbury. 2d rev. ed. Salisbury, 1976: 48, color repro. (cover).

1979: Hoozee, Robert. L'opera completa di Constable. Milan, 1979: 114, no. 281, 115, repro., color pl. xl.

1984: Reynolds, Graham. The Later Paintings and Drawings of John Constable. 2 vols. New Haven and London, 1984: 1:57, no. 20.53; 2:color pl. 177.

1984: Walker, John. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Rev. ed. New York, 1984: 408, no. 580, color repro., as A View of Salisbury Cathedral.

1985: European Paintings: An Illustrated Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1985: 93, repro.

1992: Hayes, John. British Paintings of the Sixteenth through Nineteenth Centuries. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. Washington, D.C., 1992: 39-41, color repro. 41.

2004: Hand, John Oliver. National Gallery of Art: Master Paintings from the Collection. Washington and New York, 2004: 349, no. 280, color repro.

2006: Constable's Great Landscapes: The Six-foot Paintings. Exh. cat. Tate Britain, London; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino. London, 2006: fig. 54.

2021: Kennicott, Philip and Matthew Cappucci. "Examining the Elements of Breathtaking Art." Washington Post 144, no. 225 (July 18, 2021): E1, E10, color repro.