Hadleigh Castle, The Mouth of the Thames--Morning after a Stormy Night

Constable's wife Maria died late in 1828, leaving him with seven children and a grief he never really shook. A few months later he turned to a subject he had sketched years before on a happier visit, the broken medieval tower of Hadleigh Castle on the Essex marshes, where the Thames widens toward the sea. He painted it large, in his early fifties, the ruin standing alone over empty flatland under a raw, wind-scoured morning sky. He had just been elected to the Royal Academy at last, a recognition that arrived too late to share with her. Constable worked up the crumbling stonework with a palette knife and flecks of white that some critics found unfinished and strange.