Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows

Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows is an oil painting on canvas by John Constable, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1831 and owned since 2013 by Tate, which displays it at Tate Britain in London.

Constable's ties to Salisbury came through his friends Bishop John Fisher and the bishop's nephew, Archdeacon John Fisher; he had honeymooned there with his wife Maria, and after her death in 1828 the archdeacon encouraged him to paint a large view of the cathedral. The result was one of his six-footers, the large canvases he made for the Royal Academy, and he called it the great Salisbury. It shows the cathedral across the River Nadder under a storm, with a horse-drawn wagon crossing the water and a sheepdog in the foreground. Constable rearranged the view: the tower of St Thomas's church at left cannot be seen from this spot, and he added an elder bush, which he called an emblem of death, at the foot of the tall ash.

At the 1831 exhibition the picture was accompanied by nine lines from James Thomson's poem Summer, telling of the young lovers Celadon and Amelia, killed by lightning in a storm. Constable went on working on the canvas in 1833 and 1834. The rainbow is absent from his sketches and was not mentioned by critics in 1831; its base rests where Archdeacon Fisher's house stood, and Tate research has proposed that it was added after the first exhibition to mark Fisher's death on 25 August 1832. Art historians Leslie Parris and Ian Fleming-Williams called the painting the climax of his career.

The work was on long-term loan to the National Gallery from 1983. In 2013 Tate bought it from the children of the late Lord Ashton of Hyde for £23.1 million, with tax concessions equivalent to an open-market price of £40 million, through the Aspire partnership with galleries in Wales, Scotland, Colchester and Ipswich, and Salisbury. After touring those partners, it returned to Tate Britain in 2018.