Hadleigh Castle, The Mouth of the Thames–Morning after a Stormy Night

Constable painted this canvas in 1829, the year he was elected a full member of the Royal Academy, and it was the first painting he exhibited there as an Academician. He was anxious about its reception, and the museum’s label notes that the work marked a departure from the controlled finish of his earlier painting; he reinforced its theme by printing lines from James Thomson’s poem The Seasons in the exhibition catalogue, verses of “melancholy bounds” and “rude ruins” that resonated with the loss he felt after the death of his wife Maria shortly before he began the picture. The canvas was formerly known simply as Hadleigh Castle, and passed through the collections of Walter Benjamin Tiffin, Joseph Hogarth, Louis Huth and Thomas Agnew & Sons before Paul Mellon bought it in 1961 and gave it to the Yale Center for British Art in 1977.