Bishop of Salisbury's letter to John Constable up for auction

The item, written to the artist John Constable by a key patron, forms part of the sale of "Old Masters and 19th Century Art" at Chiswick Auctions on September 18.

It comes for sale as part of an archive consigned by a descendant of John Fisher (1748-1825), Bishop of Salisbury. The papers were recently found together in storage in a loft.

Relations between the Fishers and the Constables were so strong that Constable’s 1843 biographer Charles Robert Leslie based much of his work on correspondence between the two families.

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Constable's The Ascension (Image: The Constable Trust)

John Fisher, Bishop of Exeter and then Salisbury, presided at Constable's wedding and became Constable's biggest patron and a close friend.

Himself a keen amateur artist, he commissioned the famous 1823 landscape Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop's Grounds now with the Victoria & Albert Museum while on Fisher's death, Constable commemorated him in a painting with a rainbow alighting on Fisher's house in the Cathedral Close, Leaden Hall.

The previously unknown letter to Constable, dated February 19th, 1813, was written to the artist while he was staying at his brother's Tottenham Court Road residence.

Interestingly, we know that Constable, then living in his beloved Suffolk, only stayed here for a short period of time. The letter talks of plans to meet in Salisbury and requests that Constable gifts his sister a work, either landscape or figures, as she has begun drawing herself. “My sister Fanny is beginning colouring, can you favour her with a copy - either Landschape [sic] or figures,” he writes. 

Fisher also introduced the painter to his nephew, another John Fisher (1788-1832) who was Archdeacon of Berkshire and also an important patron and friend. The painter spent his honeymoon with his new wife Maria at the younger John Fisher's home in Osmington, Dorset in 1816 and based several paintings on sketchbook drawings he made at that time.

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Included in the archive - that has been researched by Constable expert Anne Lyles - is a monochrome watercolour wash view of the church at Osmington that is attributed to either John Constable himself or John Fisher Snr. It is accompanied by two etchings by Constable’s second son Charles Golding Constable (1821-78) plus additional family diaries and a handwritten Fisher family tree. The estimate is £3,000 to £5,000.

Also in the sale are two drawings from the private collection of the family of art historian Ronald Brymer Beckett (1891-1970). Between 1962 and 1975 he published eight volumes of the edited Correspondence of John Constable (London H.M.S.O., 1962-1975), as well as Constable and the Fishers: The Record of a Friendship (1952). 

A grey wash study of a tree is attributed to Constable (estimate £1,000 to £2,000) but a pencil sketch of trees and a stile by a valley track is now thought to be a much earlier work from the late 1750s by his celebrated predecessor Thomas Gainsborough (1727-88). Gainsborough scholar Hugh Belsey, who assisted in cataloguing this lot, will add the drawing to the catalogue of the artist’s known drawings. It comes for sale with a guide of £4,000 to £6,000.