| Object | "Hadleigh Castle, The Mouth of the Thames - Morning after a Stormy Night," by John Constable |
| Date | 1829 |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Where to find | Yale Center for British Art |
When the English painter John Constable (1776-1837) first sketched Hadleigh Castle in 1814, he wrote to his then-fiancée Maria Bicknell that he was "always delighted with the melancholy grandeur of a sea shore." After the couple was married, in 1816, Constable began embarking on ever more ambitious artistic projects, including the monumental landscape paintings for which he became famous.
In the midst of Constable's growing success, Maria died of tuberculosis in November of 1828. He returned to his sketch of the ruins of Hadleigh Castle for his next large-scale landscape, which he displayed in 1829 at the Royal Academy of Arts. While the painting lacks some of the controlled finish of his earlier work, its gestural brushwork and dramatic composition combine to heighten its emotional impact.
