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

Hadleigh Castle, The Mouth of the Thames--Morning after a Stormy Night is an oil painting on canvas by John Constable, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1829 and now in the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Paul Mellon Collection.

The ruins of the 14th-century castle stand on the Essex shore where the Thames estuary widens into the stretch of water called the Nore. Constable visited in 1814 and made drawings there, writing to Maria Bicknell, later his wife, that the site commanded a view of the Kent hills, the Nore and the North Foreland, and elsewhere that he was always delighted with the melancholy grandeur of the sea shore. Fifteen years later he developed the subject into one of his large exhibition canvases, measuring 121.9 × 164.5 cm, after first working out the composition in a full-size oil sketch now at Tate. In the finished picture a shepherd and his dog walk below the broken towers, cows graze on the slope, and sunlight breaks through rolling clouds onto the water, where merchant ships pass.

The painting followed the death of Maria in 1828, and its decaying ruin and stormy sky have long been read as expressions of his grief; he compared himself to a ruin for the rest of his life. It was also the first work he showed after his election as a full Royal Academician in February 1829, and he was nervous about its reception. Its freer handling departs from the controlled finish of his earlier work. In the exhibition catalogue he added lines from James Thomson's The Seasons that speak of melancholy bounds and rude ruins.

After Constable's death the canvas was sold at Foster's in London in May 1838 and passed through several collections, including that of Louis Huth, who exhibited it in 1863 and 1888. A 1959 Arts Council catalogue described it as lost. It resurfaced with Agnew's, was bought by Paul Mellon in 1961, and was given by him to the Yale Center in 1977.