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Hence the big machines, like The Hay Wain. Hence, too, an unfamiliar — be cause privately owned — masterpiece, Salisbury Cathedral, from the Meadows, c. 1831. In the afterstorm light, the spire and facade of the cathedral show silver against slate roof, and the clouds are like marble. The cathedral sits inside the rainbow's curve as though in a proscenium arch. Then one sees how every element (building, rainbow, sky, the tree on the left and the cart) is linked by one startling device: the tree, turning on the hub of the cartwheel like an immense brush, seems to have drawn the arc of t rainbow across the sky, unveiling the cathedral as it goes. Every surface — the mudguards of the cart no less than the slowly sliding water — sparkles with a whitish impasto, virginal and dense.
Constable offers us a world both monumental and newly minted. In it, God is an Englishman.