ABSTRACT
Queen Victoria received the news of her accession on 20 June 1837 while Arundel Mill and Castle by John Constable was showing posthumously in the Royal Academy summer exhibition. The picturesque landscape challenged the academic supremacy of history painting and portraiture and made it possible for later artists to explore the full range of possibilities from the naturalism of Constable and the water-colourists to the near-abstract romanticism of Turner. The contrast between Constable's Arundel and Turner's Norham could not be more complete: the Arundel is densely worked with a classically structured three-dimensionality, complete with repoussoir recessional diagonals, and the full apparatus of illusionistic landscape perspective. The heightened awareness of William Blake and Samuel Palmer to the religious and mystical in nature created a visionary landscape of genius that was not matched by any Victorian artist, but outside the Pre-Raphaelite circle there were many artists whose landscapes and country figur.
