Landscape with a Double Rainbow

Landscape with a Double Rainbow at the Victoria and Albert Museum, dated 28 July 1812, is one of the most extraordinary works in Constable's entire output: a specific meteorological phenomenon — the double rainbow — observed at a specific date and place and recorded with the combination of scientific precision and natural drama that characterized his most ambitious plein-air work. Rainbows had been painted before — Rubens's Landscape with Rainbow, Turner's rainbow effects — but Constable's treatment is distinguished by its meteorological exactness: a primary rainbow with its normal colour sequence and a fainter secondary rainbow with its reversed sequence, the precise angle and arc of each bow corresponding to the observed phenomenon. His friendship with the meteorologist Luke Howard, whose cloud classification system Constable studied and admired, gave him the scientific framework for this kind of exact observation, and the 1812 date connects the canvas to the period when he was most intensively developing the analytical approach to natural phenomena that would define his mature practice. The V&A's holding of this rainbow study as one of its most prized Constable works reflects the painting's unique position at the intersection of scientific observation and landscape painting.

The rainbow is painted with delicate, transparent glazes over the landscape, accurately rendering the spectral colors and the darkening of sky between the primary and secondary bows. The surrounding landscape uses broader, more vigorous handling.

This remarkable dated study from 28 July 1812 is in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The painting captures a specific double rainbow observed from the hills near East Bergholt. The oil has been cleaned and stabilized. The rainbow colors, painted from direct observation, remain vivid. The work is one of the earliest careful painted studies of rainbow phenomena in English art.