The Fishers and Constables were said to be so close that much of Constable’s 1943 biography by Charles Robert Leslie was based on correspondence between the two families.

Mr Fisher, who was also a keen amateur artist, commissioned Constable’s famous landscape of Salisbury Cathedral in 1823.

The piece is now at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

When Mr Fisher died in 1825, Constable commemorated him in a painting which depicts a rainbow alighting on Leaden Hall in Cathedral Close, where he lived in Salisbury.