Word: hadleigh
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Never more so than in Hadleigh Castle, 1829. Constable brought to his view of the castle (which overlooks the Thames estuary) a pressure of melancholy: he was painting this desolate shore from memory, and his beloved wife Maria had just died of consumption. The paint is crusted, layer over layer, like mortar; even the grass and mallows in the foreground seem fossilized, and the broken tower-taller in art than in life-has an Ossianic misery to it. Then one's eye escapes to the horizon, glittering with scumbled white light, like a promise of resurrection. The whole image...
...seen fresh, without evident convention: the patches of scudding sunlight on wheat fields, the broken arc of a rainbow, the painterly delight in filling three-quarters of a canvas with high piling clouds. Time and again, one sees images in Constable that might have been lifted straight from Ruisdael. Hadleigh Castle, 1829, with its tall split tower and ruins behind, virtually repeats the motif of Ruisdael's melancholy Landscape with the Ruins of the Castle of Egmond, painted 170 years before...