La fattoria di Glebe

Constable kept returning to this quiet corner near Langham, a farm beside the little church of Saint Mary, for years. Part of the reason was a man. Back in the 1790s the rector at Langham had been John Fisher, later Bishop of Salisbury, one of the first people to believe in Constable as a painter and a steady friend ever after. When the bishop died in 1825, Constable went back to this scene and worked it up again around 1830. The version here has the loose, worked surface of something painted as much from memory as from the spot, the church tower rising through the trees where he had first known the place.