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

1829

Oil on canvas, 121.9 × 164.5 cm. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

Two shattered towers of a medieval castle stand on a hill above a wide estuary, under clouds still heavy with rain. Light breaks over the distant water, but the foreground stays dark and broken.

Shown at the Royal Academy, his first show there after election as a full Academician that February.
Look at the figure and dog at lower left, small beside the crumbling stone, and a second figure with cows on the slope beyond.
One of his six-footers; he worked out the design first in a full-size study, now at Tate Britain.
Painted in the months after his wife Maria died in November 1828, and its bleak mood is often linked to that grief. A real place becomes a picture of feeling.
Sold from his studio after his death; Paul Mellon bought it in 1961 and gave it to Yale in 1977.

Image: Yale Center for British Art (open access) · CC0