National Gallery of Australia | Audio Tour | Constable

Constable viewed this scene at Bowleaze Cove in Weymouth Bay as expressive of his own feelings and personal associations. He connected the tempestuous weather with the death of Captain John Wordsworth, the poet’s brother and his friend Mary Fisher’s cousin, who drowned near this cove with all two hundred of his crew in 1805. C.R. Leslie’s wife saw the mezzotint at Constable’s home in Charlotte Street, London, and asked if she could have it. Constable sent it to her the following day suggesting that she should: apply to it the lines of Wordsworth – ‘that sea in anger/ and that dismal shoar’. I think of ‘Wordsworth’ for on that spot, perished his brother in the wreck of the Abergavenny (Beckett III, pp. 28–29). In the list of contents for English Landscape this mezzotint was called Weymouth Bay, Dorset. – Tempestuous Evening. Lucas had begun work on this plate by January 1830 – as an impression in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, is dated ‘30 January 1830’ (Tate 1991, p. 349), – basing it on the large oil