John Constable

by Anthony Bailey

  3. Nature’s Proper Interest (1802–10)

  MANY WAR-WEARY PEOPLE in England felt more cheerful in March 1802. The Treaty of Amiens was ratified and nine years of conflict with France were interrupted by a period of peace. The Channel could once again be crossed without fear of battle or captivity. Those who had been hungry for the Continent and its culture now took their chance to journey there: to board a packet boat from Dover to Calais, to take a diligence to Paris, to wander around the Louvre and admire the paintings which had been liberated from Italy by the armies of the Corsican monster, and then, pushing on across this country which seemed to promote both mob-terrorism and the sweetest charms of civilisation, to traverse the sublime, beautiful, fearsome Alps and visit the land which harboured so many vestiges of the classical world. Many artists in London jumped at this chance: the RA President Benjamin West, Henry Fuseli, Joseph Farington, and J.M.W. Turner, already a full Academician at twenty-seven, were among the cross-Channel voyagers. John Constable was not. Despite his admiration for Claude and Rubens, he had resolved to avoid imitation of and even exposure to other artists, and he stayed put in England. He seems to have had none of the restlessness that causes many to pack their bags and seek other lands; he never crossed the Straits of Dover. He had got as far as Derbyshire, and a few years on would actually reach the Lake District in the north-west of England; but, impelled to quit London, his main ambition was to catch the Ipswich stage and eight hours later find himself at home in Suffolk, there to walk with Dunthorne and sketch the woods, fields and streams around East Bergholt.

  He was a stay-at-home artist, but he wasn’t entirely stuck in the mud. Captain Torin, a friend of his father, was to make his last voyage to the Orient for the East India Company in the spring of 1803 and invited Constable to join his ship Coutts for the first part of the passage. Turner was to say later, with his usual competitiveness, that Constable knew nothing about ships, but that wasn’t true. He may not have been a small-boat sailor like Turner but he had seafaring kinfolk. His mother’s brother John Watts had sailed with Captain James Cook. His cousin Sidey Constable captained the family’s coasting barge Telegraph on its voyages delivering grain and coal between London and East Anglia. He had watched river barges being built in the dry dock at Flatford and he knew how boats sat and moved in the water. Constable’s voyage with Captain Torin didn’t take him out of sight of England – it was largely in the Thames estuary and the inshore approaches to it, behind the Goodwin sands – but it lasted nearly a month. Constable told Dunthorne, ‘I saw all sorts of weather. Some the most delightfull, and some as melancholy … When the ship was at Gravesend, I took a walk on shore to Rochester and Chatham. Their situation is beautifull and romantic, being at the bottom of finely formed and high hills, with the river continually showing its turnings to great advantage. Rochester Castle is one of the most romantic I ever saw.’

  At Chatham the viewer of romantic medieval ruins became a student of modern warships. He hired a boat and went down the River Medway to look at the men-of-war moored in it. He sketched three views of the Victory (this was two years before Trafalgar). ‘She was the flower of the flock,’ he continued enthusiastically in his 23 May 1803 letter to Dunthorne, ‘a three-decker of (some say) 112 guns. She looked very beautifull, fresh out of Dock and newly painted. When I saw her they were bending the sails – which circumstance, added to a very fine evening, made a charming effect.’ His nautical language was roughly correct – such as bending on the sails – and the drawings he made showed personality and skill of observation. For a better view he seems to have climbed to the top of a mast on one ship, maybe the Coutts herself. Unfortunately when the Coutts got around the North Foreland she ran into a south-westerly gale and had to shelter in the lee of the Kent coast for three days. ‘Here,’ wrote the artist (obviously not an aspiring sailor), ‘I saw some very grand effects of stormy clouds.’ As the Coutts got under way again for her voyage to China, Constable was landed by boat on the shingle beach at Deal and in the confusion of disembarkation left all his four weeks’ sketching on board – about 130 drawings, mostly small. From Deal he walked the ten miles to Dover and took a coach to London next day. His drawings were happily shipped on to him before the Coutts left the Channel and he later used some of the Medway sketches for a watercolour of the Victory at Trafalgar engaged with two French ships of the line.

  The war with France was soon being waged again; the Peace of Amiens had ended in May 1803, and the people of Britain once again slept uneasily. Militias drilled and beacons were prepared. On 17 July Farington recorded: ‘I had the last night the most distinct dream of Invasion … Of seeing the French boats approach in the utmost order, and myself surrounded by them after their landing. I thought they preserved great forbearance not offering to plunder, & that I was in the midst of them some conversing in broken English. It seemed to me that they came upon the Country quite unprepared, and met with no resistance … There was during my dream a sense of great negligence in not being better prepared to receive such an enemy.’1 Constable was more concerned about the state of the Art and his own place in it. The Academy exhibition that year struck him as ‘very indifferent’ and ‘in the landscape way most miserable’. And yet this state of things intensified a feeling of his own possibilities. He wrote to Dunthorne, ‘I feel now, more than ever, a decided conviction that I shall some time or other make some good pictures. Pictures that shall be valuable to posterity, if I reap not the benefit of them.’ He had enough money to splash out and buy a dozen prints and four drawings by Waterloo and two small landscapes by Gaspar Dughet. (Leslie later noted Constable’s zeal as a collector: ‘If a book or print he wanted came in his way, the chances were he would buy it, though with the money that should pay for his next day’s dinner.’) He noted that R.R. Reinagle was following the latest fad – panorama painting – and would be exhibiting, in the Strand, a view of Rome. The panorama was, Constable observed a shade maliciously, a type of painting that suited Reinagle and kept his defects somewhat hidden. But Constable wasn’t in the main current of things. Talking to some younger artists, he was startled to hear of their admiration for Turner’s work and surprised they thought it by no means extreme.

  The Royal Academy meanwhile was gripped by civil war. Some members, including Farington, thought the King had too much influence through patronage. The monarch’s supporters wanted to get rid of Benjamin West, who was not only American by birth but allegedly pro-Napoleon. Rows broke out between members on any pretext – for example on Christmas Eve, during an argument about the giving of gold medals for architecture and sculpture, Sir Francis Bourgeois and Turner furiously slanged each other, Bourgeois calling Turner ‘a little reptile’ and Turner telling Bourgeois he was ‘a great reptile with ill manners’. Constable was out of the way in Suffolk well into the following year, sketching with George Frost ships and warehouses on the Orwell River at Ipswich, the East Anglian corn shipping centre, and making what seems to have been his first drawing of a rainbow. He didn’t exhibit at the Academy in 1804. He told Farington it was futile to compete with mediocrity; he had nothing to gain ‘by putting pictures in competition with works which are extravagant in colour and bad taste, wanting truth.’2

  Banking down his own fires but impressing his father with his diligence, he found plenty of local people ready to engage his talents. The small cottage near the Red Lion was his village studio. Portraits painted in the mornings left time for landscapes in the afternoons. The portraits were often life size, head to waist three guineas, head and shoulders two guineas. He told Farington that these low prices allowed the farmers in the vicinity to indulge their ambitions to have their children and other relatives painted.3 Among the families who sat for Constable at this time were the Cobbolds and the Bridges: he sketched Harriet and Sophia Cobbold in Ipswich in 1804 and 1806, and in 1804 he portrayed Mr and Mrs George Bridges and their eight children, arranged around a harpsichord; they lived near Manningtree. He managed to find time now or a lit
tle later to paint a portrait of his mother, sitting in an upright armchair with a spaniel on her lap. And he tackled a self-portrait for which he donned a high-collared coat and a cravat. There is just a touch of belligerence in his expression, as if he isn’t sure of the patience of the person he is staring at in the mirror – how long does he want to hold this pose? The self-portrait makes one question Lady Beaumont’s opinion, expressed to Farington this spring of 1804, that Constable ‘seemed to be a weak man’.4 (Constable, one recalls, didn’t always agree with everything Sir George Beaumont said.) Difficult, possibly; weak, no.

  Constable’s mother, Ann

  If there was weakness in any aspect of Constable’s art at this moment, it was manifest in several altarpieces he was talked into by influential local people. Dr Rhudde was rector not only of East Bergholt but of nearby Brantham church and for Brantham Constable painted a tall canvas of Christ blessing the children – a rather sickly picture much indebted to the style of Benjamin West. This, and a painting of Christ blessing the bread and wine, made for Nayland church a few years later at the behest of his well-meaning aunt Mrs Martha Smith, were to be taken as proof by Charles Leslie that Constable – after the Nayland attempt – was wise to stop making ‘incursions into this walk of the art’.5 Constable’s uncle, David Pike Watts, thought the artist had used his own brother Golding as a model for the Nayland Christ, and Golding may also have served for the Brantham altarpiece – eyes rolled heavenwards, cheeks almost cosmetically pink.6 Otherwise, the fact that Golding’s epilepsy didn’t disqualify him for this role is one element of Constable’s religious ‘incursion’ that we can be less critical about.

  The support Constable got from his relatives was lifelong. ‘Doing something for John’ seems to have been a commitment on which the whole family agreed. His mother’s sister Mary Watts married James Gubbins, a surveyor, and Constable was frequently invited to their house at Epsom; there he sketched the Common in early August 1806, and there, several years later, he painted out of doors in oils a landscape of a shallow valley, a long meadow bordered by low escarpments and clumps of trees in thick summer leaf. A happy picture, it marked a moment in which Constable found his own way as a landscape painter. Claude, Rubens, Cozens, Gainsborough – they had served their turn. But around 1806 he may still have received some useful tips from Dr William Crotch, Professor of Music at Oxford and a professional drawing master, who was only a year older than Constable and seems to have given him hints on drawing trees of full bulk. David Pike Watts, a wealthy wine merchant, was a collector of art, Gainsborough included, and in his avuncular way attempted to push forward his nephew’s career. Watts threw Constable and Crotch together at several dinner parties at his house in Portland Place. In return, Constable occasionally passed on to Uncle David news of the art world (and talked to Farington about Watts’s activities). In April 1806 Farington learned from Constable about some trouble Watts was having with Benjamin West.7 Watts was interested in a painting West had exhibited in his own gallery but they couldn’t agree a price. Eventually West said he would accept a lower price if Watts kept the sum secret; Watts, offended, declined to buy it under such a constraint. The waves rippling out from this grumpiness apparently reached out to nephew John as a journeyman in what Watts seemed to think was the important but murky world of paintings and painters.

  Constable’s reputation as a portraitist had by now reached London. Through Mrs Priscilla Wakefield, the lady who had opened his way to the RA, he spent several weeks in the summer of 1806 with the Hobson family in Tottenham. Markfield House was new, the mansion of William Hobson, a Quaker contractor, who built London docks and coastal defences and fathered sixteen children. In two small calf-bound sketchbooks and on detached sheets Constable sketched the house itself, the Hobson sons and daughters, and various domestic scenes. He also made a coloured pastel sketch of clouds above a barely suggested horizon – a precursor of many sky studies a decade and a half later. Whether a family portrait of the Bridges sort was intended we don’t know – apparently it didn’t come about – but Constable built up a large inventory of Hobson material: a young man lounging; the girls sewing and reading, sitting together and apart, playing a spinet and having tea. One brilliant oil sketch painted by an apparently entranced artist shows a young woman from the rear, a black stole dipping across a red dress that reveals her shoulders, bare back and neck – the vertical furrow in her neck leading the eye up to dark brown hair piled high in a bun.

  In the autumn of 1806 David Pike Watts suggested that his nephew might try some pastures new: instead of the Stour valley, the fellsides of the Lake District.8 Uncle David would pay his way. Constable stayed with friends of friends and with Watts’s agent, Mr Worgan, who looked after a property Watts owned, Storrs Hall, near Bowness. He toured the rugged countryside with George Gardner, son of David Gardner, the friendly and fashionable portraitist who had painted Constable ten years before and who came from this area. However, George Gardner had less tolerance for the picturesque than his companion and soon went back to Borrowdale, leaving Constable sketching. In seven weeks, not all of fine weather but of dedicated labour, Constable finished nearly ninety drawings and watercolours. At Brathay Hall, at the north end of Lake Windermere, he also made portraits in oils of his hosts Mr and Mrs Harden. John Harden did several drawings of Constable in their music room, attentive to Mr Worgan playing the harpischord and at work on a rainy-day portrait of Jessy Harden, who found Constable ‘a genteel, handsome youth’. (The ‘youth’ was now thirty.)

  Did this tour do Constable much good? Certainly the scenery – novel to him – was as close to the thrilling tremors of the sublime as you could find in England. He went to such remote places as Taylor Gill Force, a waterfall in Borrowdale. Many of his sketches were large, on tinted paper, and on many he recorded the date, the weather and particular aspects of the occasion. For example, on one pencil and watercolour view he made the inscription, ‘Borrowdale 2 Sept 1806 morning previous to a fine day.’ Again in Borrowdale on 25 September he wrote: ‘Fine cloudy day, to me very mellow, like the mildest of Gaspar Poussin and Sir G.B … from the eastern slope near Rosthwaite, looking south to Glaramara and the other hills which block the end of the valley.’ On 4 October he noted: ‘Dark Autumnal day at noon … the effect exceeding terrific – and much like the beautiful Gaspar I saw in Margaret Street.’ Later, Charles Leslie recalled hearing Constable say that the solitude of mountains oppressed his spirits. Leslie thought Constable’s ‘nature was peculiarly social … He required villages, churches, farmhouses, and cottages.’9 But though Constable never went back to the Cumbrian fells, visiting them was certainly beneficial for him. He might not quite have emulated Thomas Girtin – whom Sir George Beaumont had proclaimed the exemplar of great breadth and truth – yet the Watts-sponsored tour seemed to free him up. A number of the Borrowdale drawings and watercolours have a power until now unseen in his work and an ability to show the bones of the worn mountains poking through their rough skins. On his drawing Esk House of 12 October the son of the Stour valley wrote unloyally, ‘The finest scenery that ever was.’10 Everything he did here was superior to what his mentor Sir George would have been capable of.

  This was country that the Romantic writers claimed for their own. John Keats, staying in the Lake District in 1818, thought the mountains around Borrowdale as fine as anything he had seen. He wrote, ‘I have been very romantic indeed, among these mountains and lakes.’11 Coleridge wrote to a friend in September 1802, soon after climbing Scafell, ‘Nature has her proper interest; & he will know what it is, who believes and feels, that everything has a life of its own, & that we are all one life.’ Constable would have understood Coleridge’s belief that ‘a Poet’s Heart & Intellect should be combined, intimately combined & unified, with the great appearances in Nature – & not merely held in solution & loose mixture with them, in the shape of formal Similes’.12

  At Old Brathay a neighbour of the Hardens, Charles Lloyd – a minor poet and son of a
Birmingham banker – got Constable to paint several members of his family, including his pretty wife Sophia and their child. Lloyd’s sister Priscilla was married to Christopher Wordsworth, a Lambeth vicar and brother of William, and it was through the Lloyds that Constable met the Lake poets, Coleridge and Wordsworth. The latter brought out the sardonic rather than romantic in Constable. Farington wrote in his diary the following year: ‘Constable remarked upon the high opinion Wordsworth entertains of himself. He told Constable that while he was going to Hawkshead school, his mind was often so possessed with images, so lost in extra-ordinary conceptions, that he was held by a wall not knowing but he was a part of it.’ As Constable stood nearby, Wordsworth asked Mrs Lloyd to note the singular formation of his skull, a shape which Coleridge remarked was ‘the effect of intense thinking’. If that was the case, Farington observed, Wordsworth must have started thinking in his mother’s womb.13 Keats arrived at a similar verdict, writing in a letter, ‘Wordsworth has left a bad impression where ever he visited in town by his egotism, vanity, and bigotry. Yet he is a great poet if not a philosopher.’14

  This northern excursion of Constable’s was exceptional for the region it took him to but in another respect it came to fit a pattern: if he found it hard to leave home, once away he found it hard to return. Going south in November he called on other members of the Lloyd family to paint portraits and stayed long enough to outwear his welcome. Charles Lloyd wrote from Brathay to his brother Robert in Birmingham, ‘Is Mr Constable gone yet? I do hope he will not become troublesome.’15 When in the midst of a painting job, Constable had a way of forgetting other engagements; an obsessional concentration seized him, which could be disconcerting for his hosts or his family.