Salisbury artwork 'is Constable original' - expert

An art expert has said he is convinced that a painting in The Salisbury Museum is the original by John Constable and a version in the Louvre in Paris is a copy created by him later.

The oil painting has gone on display for the first time in 60 years at the museum in Wiltshire having previously been in a private collection.

A View of Salisbury from Harnham, an oil painting created in 1820, depicts the city and its cathedral and is on loan to the museum until 2030.

Art historian Timothy Wilcox, who has thoroughly researched the painting, said it was "downgraded 50 years ago" because it was thought to be a copy of one in the Louvre but he was "now convinced this is the original".

The Salisbury Museum described the work as a "hidden masterpiece" and said displaying it, exactly 250 years after Constable's birth, was a "landmark moment" for its collections.

Wilcox co-curated the landmark Constable exhibition at The Salisbury Museum in 2011.

He said his research on the painting came from "a lifetime of looking and gathering information".

He said: "You need to know where the written sources are, public or private, and also the relevant works, which depends on building trust and good relationships with museums, archives and private owners."

Wilcox said Constable painted the work in early July of 1820 following a number of visits to Salisbury.

"Once back in London, he began work on his most famous picture, The Hay Wain, which is a picture about an English summer," he said.

"How could the happy summer just spent in Salisbury not have been in his mind?

"Constable was a great lover of nature. He put not just the look of nature, but the love of nature, into his pictures."

Museum director Adrian Green said it had taken years of discussion to get the painting to the site.

The museum has a drawing by the English Romantic landscape painter but it has never had a painting by Constable on long-term display before.

He said this was a "tragedy, given his intimate bond with our landscape".

Green said: "He is one of Britain's, England's, greatest landscape painters, isn't he?

"He is one of the people who, in fact, defined landscape painting in this country and, in a way, almost defined our understanding of what we know of the British and English landscape."

Green said Constable was "really great friends with the Bishop of Salisbury in the early 19th Century" and that he stayed in Salisbury seven times from 1811 to 1829.

"During that period, he produced many, many pictures of this area," said Green.

Today, the view from Harnham is obscured by trees but the cathedral can be glimpsed at points.

Green said rules restricting the heights of buildings in Salisbury allowed the cathedral spire to be seen from most of the surrounding area.

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