1
Medievalism, Nationalism and Tory Nostalgia in Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral
Robert Baldwin
Associate Professor of Art History
Connecticut College
This essay was written in 2007.
Introduction to the Artist (repeated from my essay on Constable’s Cloud Sketches)
Constable was the son of a wealthy corn merchant who owned a number of mills in Flatford and Dedham. As an artist, he enjoyed only limited success in England though he did better in France thanks to the enthusiastic response of Gericault and Delacroix. His Haywain of 1821 even won a gold prize at the Salon in 1824. Unfortunately Constable was unwilling to move to Paris where he would have found real critical and commercial success. Nor was he willing to paint the popular Romantic landscapes then favored in England(Martin, Turner) which depicted wild, sublime, or exotic settings. As Constable told his biographer, he had no interest in visiting solitary landscapes which he found oppressive. In this sense, he also differed from Wordsworth and from most of the Romantics for whom nature was most authentic when uninhabited.
His preferred subject remained the ordinary English countryside with its villages, farms, locks, mills, and modest, parish churches. Occasionally he ventured into more majestic subjects with historical significance such as Salisbury Cathedral.
Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral seen from the Bishop’s Grounds (1826, Frick)
English Tourism in the Age of the Picturesque and Romanticism (1760-1820)
Built between 1220 and 1265, Salisbury Cathedral was one of England’s most venerable and famous Gothic cathedrals and already a feature in guidebooks to England since the early 18th century (Defoe). By the later eighteenth century, the cathedral began appearing in small paintings and prints where it was invariably seen from a distance outside town to embed the church into a suitably picturesque landscape. The late eighteenth century saw a multitude of illustrated guide books to different parts of England, most written by local landowners who commissioned artists to deign illustrations. This tradition of amateur travel writing continued until the development of rail lines in the mid-nineteenth century allowed the professionalization of travel and travel guides and the emergence of the modern travel industry.
In the later eighteenth century, the picturesque movement preferred landscapes with medieval ruins overtaken by vegetation and fully integrated into nature. None was more popular than Tintern Abbey, a Gothic ruin in a relatively unpopulated section of the countryside which became a popular tourist site thanks to its prominent appearance in William Gilpin's Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales, &c. Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; Made in the Summer of the Year 1770. [1] Published in 1782 and reprinted five times by 1800, Gilpin’s guide inspired a later landowner near Salisbury to plan a similar guide for his region with a dozen engravings of Salisbury Cathedral based on watercolors by Turner. Although this ambitious project never came to fruition, the patron proudly hung Turner’s large watercolors in a single room, creating a kind of art gallery to one artist’s depictions of the great English Cathedral. [2]
Although three of the six paintings Constable made of Salisbury Cathedral between 1820 and 1834 were for patrons working at the church, the decision to execute so many paintings of a single theme – unprecedented in his career – suggests the search for more appealing and marketable subjects without giving up his attachment to British settings. As one German visitor to the RoyalAcademy exhibitions in 1820 noted, British landscape painters “are also fully aware that a view of Windsor or Richmond is more likely to find a purchaser than an original composition and thus they confine themselves to the representations of scenes which are familiar to every eye.” [3]
By painting Salisbury cathedral, Constable may also have hoped to capitalize on the Gothic Revival movement then sweeping English and Continental architecture. Turning their back on a 400 year old classical-Renaissance architectural tradition since Brunelleschi, Gothic Revival architects and critics hailed the Gothic as the supreme accomplishment of Western architecture and the form of architecture which most closely adhered to nature’s principles. (Renaissance writers used the same rationale to praise classical architecture and to reject medieval aesthetics as unnatural.)
Even though Constable dismissed the Gothic Revival movement as false imitation, he was presumably happy to have a marketable subject in Salisbury Cathedral. He was also well aware of the much wider taste for all things medieval which began with Romanticism and continued on and off through the nineteenth century. Across Europe, medievalism went hand in hand with nationalism, especially in England, widely seen as the birthplace of chivalry in the court of King Arthur. Small wonder that nineteenth-century British writers and artists took a special interest in chivalric themes as seen in Walter Scott’s bestseller, Ivanhoe(1819) to Tennyson’s Arthurian saga, Idyll of the Kings(1859-1872) and the many Arthurian and medieval subjects painted later by the Pre-Raphaelites.Medieval themes were also common in Continental literature and art right through to the late-nineteenth-century Symbolist movement (Maurice Denis, Odilon Redon.)
As with other important Gothic cathedrals in England, Salisbury Cathedral was also famous for the tombs of its great lords and ladies. As early as the 1720s, Daniel Defoe had catalogued all of the famous tombs in Salisbury Cathedral for English tourists. [4]As a national monument carrying patriotic significance, Salisbury Cathedral embodied the fusion of church and state so important to Tory conservativeslike Constable. These ties were particularly strong in England as the only country to have its own, national church headed by the king.
Constable also had personal reasons for painting so many scenes of Salisbury Cathedral. One of his good friends was John Fisher, bishop of Salisbury, for whom he painted the first three canvases: a painting now in the V&AMuseum followed by a full-size oil sketch (Met) for a third painting of 1826, now in the Frick. Bishop Fischer was a generous patron of writers and artists, a leading churchman in England, and such a good friend of King George III that he was known as “the King’s Fischer”. Early in his career, in 1790, the future bishop was given the rectorship of Langham near Constable’s family home. Although Fischer was rarely present, he probably met the artist as early as in 1798. In 1802, Bishop Fischer invited Constable to WindsorCastlewhere he secured for Constable the post of drawing master at the nearby RoyalMilitaryCollege. Though Constable declined this offer, he remained on good terms with the Bishop who invited to St.JamesPalace a few months later. Through his friendship with Bishop Fischer, Constable became even closer to his nephew of the same name. The younger John Fischer was also a clergyman and eventually became Archdeacon Fisher. He was so close to Constable that he presided over his wedding. Constable often visited the extended Fisher family at their seaside home in Dorset and he and his wife Maria even honeymooned there.
Salisbury Cathedral Seen from the Bishop’s Grounds (Frick Collection) shows the bishop and his wife strolling on the grounds of their home inside the cathedral compound. Bishop Fisher liked Constable’s first painting, now in the V&AMuseum but found the clouds too dark and gloomy over the eastern end of the church. When he commissioned a smaller version in late 1623 for his daughter’s upcoming wedding, he asked Constable to brighten the clouds. In the study (Met) and the final version (Frick), Constable brightened the clouds and opened the tree branches to allow the spire – the tallest of any English Gothic cathedral - to soar proudly into the heavens. (Here one remembers the way Constable moved the tree in the final version of The Leaping Horse to allow that surging figure to leap against and into the sky).
Constable also chose this cathedral because it was surrounded by very large greens, in contrast to most English cathedrals which were hemmed in by houses and other city buildings. It was one thing to paint ruined abbeys and monasteries built out in the remote countryside and to extol the solitude of such places as did Wordsworth in his Line Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey. While Constable generally avoided uninhabited landscapes, he was quite happy to paint small Gothic churches and village houses peeking over the trees in the distance as in his Stoke-by-Nayland (1834-7). These smaller town and village churches, shrunk down even further by a distant prospect, allowed Constable to use medieval churches to image the small-scale simplicity and piety of village life frequently invoked in burgher pastoral since the Renaissance and ubiquitous in English Romantic poetry. The reassuring presence of steeples is also worth noting at a time when so many writers lamenting the despoiled English countryside pointedly contrasted the old steeple with the new, smoke-belching factory chimney. [5]It was quite another thing to attempt a landscape painting focused on a large urban building. Fortunately, the extensive green lawns surrounding Salisbury Cathedral made it much easier for Constable to translate his urban subject into the terms of landscape painting.
To integrate cathedral and landscape more completely, Constable made a whole series of strategic decisions in composition, perspective and spatial handling, and light. By using trees on either side to frame the cathedral, Constable blocked off any view of the nearby city, removing the cathedral from any taint of urban corruption. He further tied the cathedral to the land around it by painting it from the side, thereby allowing its extensive length to unfold along the flat lay of the land, a theme underscores by horizontal line of the stream. And by setting the cathedral in the background of his space while adopting a low perspective, Constable fused the foundation line of the cathedral with the horizon line of the natural setting. Although firmly planted on the ground, the cathedral seems to float against the sky directly behind, its heavy stone further dematerialized by the bright sunlight and the contrast with the darker, solid foreground.
The tree on the left bends toward the church as if paying homage to it or recognizing some inner kinship. The tree on the right is old with many dead limbs yet despite its age it manages to send forth new branches and greenery, some of which points toward the cathedral like the Bishop who uses his walking stick to direct his wife’s attention. The old trees ability to regenerate underscores the continuing vitality of the church and the religious values of England. Fertility is quietly continued in the married couple strolling nearby and the use of red in Mrs. Fisher’s shawl and the flowers behind her.
Framed by trees whose arched shapes confirm the natural qualities of the Gothic cathedral behind them (a commonplace in Gothic Revival theory), Constable’s cathedral sits majestically in a pastoral landscape as if it had been transplanted to the fertile Salisbury Plain outside the city. Here is Defoe’s rapturous account of that plain as an English Arcadia.
“… that fine down or carpet ground which they call … Salisbury Plain. It has neither house nor town in view all the way; . . . there is a certain never-failing assistance upon all these downs for telling a stranger his way, and that is the number of shepherds feeding or keeping their vast flocks of sheep which are everywhere in the way, and who with a very little pains a traveler may always speak with. Nothing can be like it. The Arcadians' plains, of which we read so much pastoral trumpery in the poets, could be nothing to them.”[6]
Although the cathedral introduces a note of medieval historical specificity, the landscape elements allow the viewer to imagine the cathedral has always been there, as if church and feudal state had grown up organically in England’s “green and pleasant land”, as if the most monumental accomplishment of late medieval engineering and urban civilization in a building famous for its great expense was compatible with cows and sheep and a world without money, politics, or artifice. [7]
With the fertile meadow and fat cows drinking from a stream, the English countryside seems to blossom under the benevolent authority of the Anglican church, reinforcing traditional ties between church and state. The overall effect is to image all of Englandas a kind of terrestrial paradise, an earthly image of the heavenly Jerusalem free from the ills of industrial modernity as described in Blake’s poem, Jerusalem.
And did those feet in ancient time
walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
on England's pleasant pastures seen?
And did the countenance divine
shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
among those dark satanic mills?
Bring me by bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!
I will not cease from mental fight,
nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
till we have built Jerusalem
in England's green and pleasant land.
For all its religious imagery, the painting also displays the new secularizing of religion characteristic of Romantic landscape painting and poetry which relocated the sacred in an untouched, untainted, pre-modern nature. Even Bishop Fisher has been romanticized here, in accord with his genuinely Romantic temperament expressed in letters describing the idyllic simplicities of his seaside getaway in Dorset. [8] Rather than showing Bishop Fisher at his desk through the window of his home, or emerging from the portal of the distant cathedral in his bishop’s robes, Constable naturalized the bishop by showing him in simpler, everyday clothes unattached to his high office, and strolling arm in arm with his wife through the countryside. By removing his home from the composition, Constable allows us to imagine the couple as two Wordsworthian wanderers enjoying a long, romantic walk in the countryside and surprising themselves with the discovery of something quite extraordinary.
The English Rural Economy from 1750 to the End of Constable’s Life (1837)
The imaginary nature of all Constable's landscapes, both sketches and finished works, is exposed even more strikingly when we contemplate the historical and psychic distance between his farm landscapes and the catastrophic changes in the English countryside which were well established by 1810 and worsened considerably during his lifetime.
18th and early 19th-century England can be roughly divided down the middle with the western half geared more toward the pastoral economy of cattle and sheep and the eastern half geared toward farming, especially grains. With the big new industrial towns concentrated in the North and West, the area where Constable grew up had no big cities anywhere save London. It was the most “traditional” area of England in that sense, composed of small market towns and hundreds of villages.
Prior to 1775, most farming in England was open-field farming. English village farm land typically consisted of narrow strips of individually owned land laid out side by side. No walls or boundaries divided one piece of land from another. At the planting and harvest season when there was much work to be done in a short time span, the village community all worked together to plant and harvest everyone’s fields. Although land was divided into small, individually owned plots, it was worked communally and known as the commons.
Land Tenure and the Rural Class System
Despite this communal forming and open land, a striking class system was well established by the early to mid eighteenth century based on who owned what. Much of the land consisted of large estates in the hands of the nobles and landed gentry. They rented out their lands to tenant farmers, at stiff rents or tithes. Most tenant farmers rented modest farms incapable of generating significant profits even in times of good harvest. Yet they still had to pay the wealthy landowners (who mostly lived in London) the same high tithes in good years and bad, regardless of drought, flooding, infestation, and other natural disasters which brought poor harvests and economic devastation. Since tenant farmers owned nothing, their situation was precarious. A bad year could throw them off the land they rented and reduce them to peasant laborers, the lowest, most desperate strata of the rural economy. Thus the stiff rents imposed on tenant farmers exerted downward pressures on the wages paid to laborers.
At the bottom of this system was the majority of people who lived in the countryside, the peasant labor force who owned nothing, rented nothing, and lived on a wage of a dollar a day or less which guaranteed a lifetime of impoverishment. Rural wages fell even further in the early nineteenth century with the invention of new harvesting machines in the mid to late eighteenth century (all pulled by horses). Other than the landed gentry, the only people who made money from farming were mill owners like Constable’s father who owned a corn mill on the StourRiver.