Old Sarum, a mound one-and-a-half miles north of Salisbury, was an Iron-Age hill fort, later occupied by the Romans, the Saxons and the Normans. The Normans built a castle within the perimeter of the mound and a cathedral below it, but disputes between soldiers and priests, along with inadequate water supply, led to the building of New Sarum, the present city of Salisbury, in 1226. The old cathedral was dismantled and a new one built at Salisbury, and the old settlement began to fade away. By Constable’s day, Old Sarum was a desolate and deserted place. He wrote that Old Sarum had once been the political and religious centre of the kingdom, but that the ‘once proud and populous city’ had become a barren waste, ‘tracked only by sheepwalks’, where ‘every vestige of human habitation, have long since passed away’. In his watercolour Old Sarum 1834 Constable painted a solitary shepherd in the foreground, in front of the expansive open plain and mound of Old Sarum. He presented this scene under a dramatic and powerful sky, with light breaking through thunderclouds. This is one of Constable’s most significant watercolours. He conceived it as an exhibition piece, uniting his direct personal vision of landscape with a broader, historical idea, suggesting destruction and oblivion. Shown in 1834, it was the first work of the kind that he ever exhibited at the Royal Academy and it demonstrated his mastery of the watercolour medium. On 31 March 1837 Constable was busy finishing a painting of Arundel mill and castle. A friend visiting in the afternoon noted that Constable seemed unwell. Later that night, after returning from an errand, he went to bed. He read himself to sleep but woke in great pain. He died within half an hour, at the age of sixty. Activities • Look how Constable uses diagonals on land and also in the dramatic sky to direct the viewer’s eye to the far distant horizon on the left, directly above the shepherd with his flock and dogs. The mound of Old Sarum is positioned centrally to stabilise this dynamic composition. • Use the zoom to examine the way Constable handles watercolour paint on paper.