Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows

Constable exhibited this in 1831, three years after his wife Maria died, and the grief is woven into how the picture was made. His close friend Archdeacon John Fisher, who lived at Salisbury, had urged him toward this large and ambitious view partly to pull him out of his mourning. A storm is breaking up over the cathedral, the sky dark and turbulent, and a rainbow arcs across it, coming to ground at Leadenhall, the house in the cathedral close where Fisher lived. Constable added that rainbow late, after the earlier full-size study, so it reads less as weather than as something he decided the picture needed. The spire stands pale and steady against the churning cloud, a fixed thing while the sky moves. It is one of his great six-foot canvases, the scale he reserved for the landscapes that mattered most to him.