LONDON, May 24: The Tate Britain museum bought 19th century English painter John Constable’s masterpiece “Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows” for 23.1 million pounds (34.75 million dollars), making it one of the most expensive British paintings ever sold.
The painting, dated 1831, of the towering cathedral in the middle distance under an overcast sky shot through with a rainbow had been at risk of being sold abroad and its sale sets a record for Constable, the Tate said yesterday.
Its price is still dwarfed by Constable’s contemporary rival J.M.W. Turner, whose “Modern Rome – Campo Vaccino” sold for 44.68 million dollars in 2010 and by the top record for a work of art. Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” sold for 120 million dollars last year.
“‘Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows’ is one of the great masterpieces of British art,” Tate Director Nicholas Serota said in a statement announcing the deal.
BBC Arts Editor Will Gompertz said the painting, which was on loan at another museum in London from an aristocratic British family, was one of most accomplished works by one of the finest and most exciting painters of the Romantic period.
“23.1 million pounds might be a record for a Constable but it’s worth every penny: a bargain compared to what’s being paid for some second rate modern art,” he wrote on the BBC website.
The Constable purchase was part of a new partnership linking five national and regional galleries across Britain, which will enable the work to go on almost constant view.
The landscape is one of a series of monumental “six-footer” canvases painted by Constable on a scale he reserved for the paintings he wished to make a great impact in the crowded, competitive environment of Royal Academy exhibitions.
The painting is considered the most visually spectacular of all his six footers, the most loaded in meaning and the one of which he was most proud.
Constable called it “The Great Salisbury” and wrote: “I am told I got it to look better than anything I have yet done”.
($1 = 0.6647 British pounds)
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