Constable did not treat Salisbury Cathedral as a single fixed subject. He returned to it across his career from a number of different viewpoints, and the versions painted from the garden of the Bishop's Palace, at the invitation of his close friend John Fisher, Bishop of Salisbury, are the best documented and most discussed today^[1]. Lower Marsh Close offered a different vantage point entirely, away from the bishop's own grounds, giving Constable a freer view of the cathedral than the closely specified commission he painted for his friend.

For the Bishop's Palace commission, Fisher did not leave the composition to Constable's judgement. He specified the exact viewpoint he wanted, framed through an arch of trees, and asked that he and his wife be shown walking in the garden below, gesturing toward the building^[1]. Constable, who normally worked from the seemingly incidental details of the countryside he knew, found the constraint of painting a named building to a patron's precise brief unusually difficult, later writing simply that his cathedral looked very good, while privately regarding it as the hardest landscape he had ever had on his easel^[1].

The one part of the Bishop's Palace picture Fisher objected to was the sky. Constable had painted dark storm clouds gathering over the spire, and the bishop sent the finished canvas back to be reworked, writing to Constable that clouds are black only when it is about to rain, and that the sky should be blue when the weather is fine^[1]. The exchange captures a real difference in outlook between patron and painter: Fisher wanted an image of settled, harmonious order, while Constable, who treated the sky as one of the most expressive and changeable parts of any landscape throughout his career, was reluctant to paint weather he had not actually observed.