MASP

By Luciano Migliaccio
As is well known, this view of the Salisbury Cathedral was one of Constable’s favorite themes during his lifetime. His friendship with Dr. John Fischer, bishop of Salisbury, and his family, in whose home he was a frequent guest, leads to his painting the Cathedral such as it is perceived from that exact angle. In all the versions there is the presence of the bishop and his wife, indicating with his cane “his” cathedral. The most frequently mentioned example of this landscape, dating back to 1823 and housed in the Victoria and Albert Museum, was commissioned by the bishop, displayed at the Royal Academy that same year, and retouched at the request of the bishop himself in the following year. A second version, signed and dated 1826 (but the date might refer to the time the work was resumed, two or three years after its first execution), is found in the Frick Collection in New York, having belonged to John Fischer’s daughter. Constable changes the two paintings at the request of his friends in Salisbury, who want a composition where the trees conceal less of the sky, as is actually the case of the two versions. The fact that in Masp’s version, reproduced in 1948 and in 1950 on the covers of the magazines Connoisseur and Apollo, the foliage conceals a significant portion of the sky, seems to confirm, in the opinion of Bardi (letter to the publishing house Rizzoli dated 9/5/1978), an earlier dating of the work, a hypothesis already conceived by Andrew Shirley in a long expertise (Masp, 8/31/1954), conducted during the exhibition of Masp work at the Tate Gallery in 1954. This expertise, which we transcribe here in full, places the version in question very favorably in the series to which it belongs: “Of all the documented variants on this theme, this has the most of the original freshness of the universally accepted sketch in the T.W. Bacon Collection, which has the liquid flash of a Rubens decoration (Shirley: Leslie’s Life of Constable, pl. 81). It follows the solution achieved in the sketch of the painter’s central problem – how to soften the uncompromising yet lovely line of the spire, of which Constable wrote with affection that “it darted up into the sky like a needle”. Here, perhaps most perfectly, he interprets the contrast between the severity of human architecture and the sinuosity of the trees, whose graceful arabesques break across the firm lines of the stone. This beauty is absent from the versions in the Victoria and Albert Museum and (formerly) in the Mirehouse Collection, which were painted for that kind but literal-minded man, bishop Fischer. But it recurs in the Frick Collection picture of 1826. From this date one may judge that Constable preferred his first approach to the subject. These differences prompt another question. It used to be assumed that the sketch for an Academy picture immediately preceded the finished picture. I have become increasingly convinced that this was not the way in which Constable’s mind worked. He was a dreamer, but a practical dreamer, who drew from the drawers of his memory. If this personal opinion is right, this picture and the Bacon sketch anticipate the Victoria and Albert Museum picture (exhibited at the Academy in 1823) by at least two years. Both are nearer to The Haywain (1821) in handling than to The Lock (1824). This picture, then, becomes capital in Constable’s development. It implies that Constable’s preoccupation with Rubens suffered a shorter eclipse than we had thought after his second attempt to master Rubens’s technical principles in 1815. Since the whole of the Constable-Delacroix-Bonington movement was based on Rubens, a fact of this sort has a solid place in the history of Nineteenth-Century painting”.

— Luciano Migliaccio, 1998

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