索尔兹伯里附近的水草地

Constable made this on one of his long stays with his closest friend John Fisher, an archdeacon who lived in the cathedral close at Salisbury. He was there in the summer of 1820 and again in July 1829, and the Ashmolean dates the picture somewhere across those years. The ground he was painting was engineered. The Harnham meadows had been laid out around 1660 as a machine for growing early grass, a web of carriers, drains and hatches that let the river be spread over the field in a sheet about an inch deep. The water held off frost, left silt behind and brought the grass on weeks ahead of dry land, so the ewes could lamb sooner. By the 1790s Wiltshire had some 20,000 acres running that way, worked by men called drowners. This view takes in the left half of another Constable oil sketch dated 12 July 1829, now at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.