After the death of his wife Constable weathered his grief through painting, and found God’s presence in the animation of nature

“I shall never feel again as I have felt – the face of the World is totally changed to me,” John Constable wrote to his brother Abram after the death of his wife Maria from consumption in November 1828.

As the face of the world was what he painted, the death of Constable’s beloved wife – the mother of his seven children – had an inevitable effect on his work. On entering the Royal Academy’s exhibition “Late Constable” (until 13 February), you’re immediately struck by the darkness of the atmosphere. Where Constable’s earlier skies – his chief “organs of sentiment” – were cheerfully animated by sunlit cloud, from the late 1820s, as Maria’s health worsened, they grew increasingly overcast. The face the world turns on us in the stormy Hadleigh Castle (1829), painted in the immediate wake of Maria’s death, is grim.

No artist’s work is proof against personal tragedy; its impact will be reflected in their art, especially in the case of an autobiographical artist who believed “painting is but another word for feeling”. The Suffolk landscapes Constable had previously painted were coloured by sunny memories of his “careless boyhood”; they recalled the places where the miller’s son turned artist had grown up and where he had courted, and finally won the hand of, the wealthy lawyer’s daughter Maria Bicknell.