National Gallery of Australia | Audio Tour | Constable

Constable painted this fourth version of The Glebe Farm more freely than any of the other three versions. Using both palette knife and brush, he gave this painting a warm tonality, with flickering highlights. He included a spire in the upper right, rather than the square tower of Langham Church of the other three images – although the spire sits on a Langham Church-style square tower. He first introduced a windmill in place of the tower, and traces of its sails are still visible beneath the spire. Reynolds has suggested that Constable is likely to have painted this work in the autumn of 1830. The glebe was traditionally land farmed to support the living of the church, but the farm in this picture was not in fact on glebe land. Michael Rosenthal has noted that in depicting a cottage landscape in a woodland Constable was working in the Picturesque tradition of Hobbema and Gainsborough (Rosenthal 1983, p. 180). He was moreover painting a ‘landscape of memory’ – the rural world he depicted had since changed as