About this work
The painting shows a scene on a river just by Salisbury, with water and sky dominating the canvas, and a band of landscape between them featuring trees and meadows.
The foreground and a third of the picture are claimed by the River Avon, while the sky commands the lion's share of the composition.
The river runs dark and reflective, mirroring the trees on the far shore, and it is just possible — despite that depth of tone — to sense a riverbed beneath. A small steep bank rises opposite, with clumps of reeds thriving alongside it in the water.
Across the centre, left to right, the water meadows open out — a green and flowered field nudging against a more agricultural one, a dark fleck suggesting a bird or animal in the grass, and in the background a scattering of houses, a hedgerow, distant hills, and a short row of poplars.
The sky completes the scene: expansive, light blue, and covered in thin grey cloud.
The paint is applied with thick impasto and Constable's characteristic tiny dabs of red — small, electric marks that reward close looking and give the surface a restless, living quality entirely at odds with the stillness of the scene.
*Water Meadows Near Salisbury* is an 1820 landscape painting made during one of Constable's regular stays at Salisbury with his close friend John Fisher.
He painted this fresh and atmospheric view in the grounds of Fisher's home — Fisher was a canon of Salisbury Cathedral and Constable's closest friend.
Executed in oil on canvas and measuring approximately 45.7 × 55.3 cm, it is an intimate, direct work — the kind Constable produced when painting was an act of looking rather than performing. When Constable later intended to show it at the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1830, the selection committee rejected it — one member calling it a "poor thing" and "very green," apparently unaware it was Constable's work. Although by then a full Academician and entitled to show all submitted pictures, he chose to withdraw it, perhaps out of embarrassment.
It was later acquired by collector John Sheepshanks, who in 1857 included it in the celebrated Sheepshanks Gift to the nation — today it is held in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. That story of rejection and posthumous vindication says everything about what Constable was doing: painting England as it actually looked, not as convention demanded.
This is a painting that rewards a quiet room. Its greens
