Hadleigh Castle, The Mouth of the Thames--Morning After a Stormy Night

This image depicts the ruins of Hadleigh Castle in Essex, England.

The two remaining towers of Hadleigh Castle stand in the left register of the picture plane. Underbrush and foliage have over-grown the crumbling ruins. In the lower left corner, a shepherd boy, staff in hand, walks towards the ruins followed by a dog. To the right of the tower closest to the center of the image, another figure, presumably a cowherd, lounges on the hill that leads down to the water, watching over three cows as they graze on the craggy hillside. Several seagulls fly in a diagonal pattern across the picture plane toward the horizon. Large cumulus clouds nearly cover the sky, rays of sunlight breaking through to illuminate the distant horizon.

In 1814, Constable visited the ruins while touring south Essex with an old friend, the Reverend W.W. Driffield, the vicar of Feering near Colchester. In a letter to his betrothed Maria Bicknell, Constable wrote that “‘there is a ruin of a castle which from its situation is really a fine place—it commands a view of the Kent hills, the nore and north foreland & looking many miles to the sea’” (John Constable’s Correspondence 127). He made a drawing of the view in the sketchbook he was carrying at the time, and based this painting, and its ancillary sketches, upon this primary perception. It is significant that at the time of the initial sketch, Constable was in the midst of the most discouraging stage of his courtship with Maria. This depression is reflected in his aforementioned letter when he writes that he had "walked upon the beach at South End. I was always delighted with the melancholy grandeur of a sea shore" (John Constable’s Correspondence 127). Constable only returned to the sketch after Maria's death in November, 1828. Many scholars believe that this scene of loneliness and decay was especially poignant for Constable in times of desolation. In a letter to C.R. Leslie dated January 21, 1829, Constable writes “I have been ill but I have endeavored to get to work again—and could I get a float on a canvas of six feet I might have a chance of being carried away from myself” (John Constable’s Correspondence 255). A later letter from Abram Constable suggests that it is the composition of Hadleigh Castle that lifted the painter out of his depression: “You will now proceed with your Picture of the Nore—and I think it will be beautiful” (John Constable’s Correspondence 255).

In Literary Landscapes: Turner and Constable, Ronald Paulson links the paintings of John Constable and the poetry of William Wordsworth as both working to create a single artistic revolution. Paulson claims that, like Wordsworth, Constable was revolutionary in “seeking a basic change in the artistic subject and source of inspiration” (107). Although Constable’s landscapes can be linked to the poetic and prose works of the time, his ideological revolution in painting “lies in the elevation of independent landscape, free of both literary texts and the human-centered assumptions of Claude and Turner” (Paulson 108). For Constable, the composition itself could become a text, rendering an already symbolic structure, such as a ruin or temple, more sublime through dramatic perspective, lighting, and brushwork. However, the landscapes of Constable’s final decade, which includes Hadleigh Castle, are far more symbolic than his previous works, and seem to utilize the very techniques he had previously denounced. The painting's potential for symbolism becomes more evident if one examines the personal trauma surrounding its initial conception and later execution: the composition seems infused with Constable's despair over the loss of his wife, and his choice of the ruin as a subject is not insignificant. Several commentators suggest that his awareness of the ruin as an artistic subject and symbol may have come from his reading of Wordsworth’s “Elegiac Stanzas,” and Leslie Parris and Ian Flemming-Williams contend that Wordsworth’s stoic conclusion—“‘Not without hope we suffer and mourn’”—is perfectly aligned with the circumstances surrounding the composition of Hadleigh Castle (314).