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Commentary: Constable painted several views of the south façade of Salisbury Cathedral for his intimate friends Dr. John Fisher, Bishop of Salisbury, and the Bishop's nephew Archdeacon John Fisher, who had purchased The White Horse. Constable’s first version of the Cathedral, done for the Bishop (now in the Victoria and Albert Museum), had a dark, cloudy sky. In response to the owner’s objections to its ominous atmosphere, Constable painted this version with a sunnier sky and a more open composition. As in the earlier canvas, Constable included the figure of the Bishop pointing out the Cathedral’s spire to his wife, and beyond them a young lady holding a parasol, presumably one of their daughters. The Bishop had died by the time the picture was completed, but it was acquired by his family. Two favorite subjects of nineteenth-century artists — a medieval ecclesiastical monument and a dramatic landscape — are particularly well united through the arrangement of tree trunks and branches echoing the rising lines of the Cathedral spire.
Source: Art in The Frick Collection: Paintings, Sculpture, Decorative Arts, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996.
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