Watcher of the skies: John Constable, painter and meteorologist

A surprising amount of classic painting turns out to have specific, often literary meaning, even in genres which tend to strike us as innocent observations of reality. Dutch flower paintings, for instance, might be celebrations of wealth or contemplations of mortality; still lifes were seldom just renderings of a few bits of fruit and vegetables lying around on the kitchen table; and landscapes were hardly ever merely depictions of handsome tracts of land, whether by Rembrandt or Richard Wilson.

John Constable’s work, which rarely emphasises explicit significance, was something new. There were occasional ventures into metaphor and symbolism, such as the late painting ‘Cenotaph to the Memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds’ and the grand view of Salisbury cathedral beset by lightning and framed with a rainbow. But these were rare. The magnificent ‘Hadleigh Castle’ of 1829 may have been begun, as James Hamilton suggests, as a statement of the terrible grief Constable felt after his wife’s early death the previous year; but his interest in capturing the ‘wheeling gulls, some wandering cattle and a ruminative shepherd and his dog’ took over.