National Gallery of Australia | Audio Tour | Constable

When his good friend and patron, Bishop Fisher of Salisbury died in 1825, Constable decided to paint an elegiac work in his memory. He chose to depict the church of St Mary the Virgin at Langham, where Fisher had been rector when Constable met him in 1798. Constable compressed a view of the church with the image of a nearby farmhouse. The picture he called ‘The Glebe Farm’. Constable depicted the view along a valley with water in the foreground, where a cow is drinking, tall trees to the left and the farmhouse beside the church tower on a hill to the right. He based the farmhouse on a small oil sketch from nature he had made around 1811–15, Church Farm, Langham (Victoria and Albert Museum, London). The sketch does not include Langham Church. Although it has been suggested that the church would have been out of sight behind the farmhouse when viewed from this angle, Anne Lyles has recently shown the author that this is not the case.The image of Glebe Farm was a favourite with Constable, and he painted four v