A drawing Constable did of himself in this busy year shows his assurance – a confident profile, aquiline nose, firm chin, long sideburns.16 He had sent to the RA exhibition a fine watercolour of the Victory sandwiched between two French ships at Trafalgar, the only error being in his subtitle which made E. Harvey (of the Temeraire) rather than T. Hardy the captain of Nelson’s flagship. Back in London from Birmingham he saw a lot of David Wilkie and Benjamin Haydon; they regularly had dinner together at Slaughter’s in St Martin’s Lane. ‘This period of our lives was one of great happiness,’ recorded Haydon, thereafter not often happy. ‘Painting all day, then dining at Old Slaughter’s Chop House.’ Constable’s three entries for the 1807 Academy exhibition sprang from his tour of the Lakes; he told Farington that in one ‘he thought he had got something original’. The paintings attracted his first press notice. The St James’s Chronicle was struck by his View in Westmoreland and wrote that Constable ‘seems to pay great attention to Nature and in this picture has produced a bold effect.’17 Encouraged by this, Constable asked Farington whether he should put his name in for the Academy elections as a candidate for Associate membership. Thomas Stothard, Academician and brilliant draftsman, had apparently raised the subject with him. Farington told Constable that he wasn’t likely to be elected, ‘but he might put down his name to make [it] familiar to the members’. Farington added rather earnestly that the best impression was made by meritorious works. Constable said that for the present he would decline to put down his name.18
Self-portrait of 1806
The summer of 1807 saw Constable so busy in London he was unable to get to East Bergholt. An invitation had come from the Earl of Dysart – whose domains included Helmingham Park, a London house in Piccadilly and Ham House in Richmond – to copy family portraits.19 This was hack work, but reasonably paid, and since some of the paintings being copied were by Reynolds and Hoppner, Constable willy-nilly learned a good deal more about portrait painting. Charles Leslie afterwards said he thought it a pity that these chores kept Constable from painting landscapes, but he certainly got to appreciate Reynolds’s sense of colour and the contrast between light and dark, or chiaroscuro. Moreover, Constable continued to be a keen RA student. Farington on 16 November 1807 heard from the horse’s mouth that Constable was spending every evening at the Life Academy in Somerset House, that he was ‘settled’ as a painter, and that his father was now reconciled to his artistic career. David Pike Watts, whose portrait he had recently painted, also uttered sententious words of approval, declaring that ‘J.C. is Industrious in his profession, Temperate in his diet, plain in Dress, frugal in Expenses … and in his professional character has great Merit’.20 The paragon was among a number of eminent artists Uncle David invited to a dinner party in December 1807. Farington was there, and so were Northcote, West, Stothard, Anthony Carlisle (the RA Professor of Anatomy) and Dr Crotch, the composer and drawing master, in some senses a professional guest since at these Watts dinners he played for a fee. Farington in his diary bit the hand that had fed him by noting that Watts had ‘an habitual reverence for rank & title’. But Watts did his best to grease the ways for his nephew’s advancement in the Art. And Constable showed diplomacy he didn’t always display with his contemporaries by turning the other cheek to Watts’s critical comments on his work – although he had the temerity to say he couldn’t understand why Watts had chosen to live in Portland Place, which hurt his uncle’s feelings. Watts was also unhappy at changes Constable made to the Brantham Christ Blessing the Children; a more finished picture may have resulted but it didn’t interest Watts any more. He said, ‘The mind of the Picture has fled.’ Later, in 1810, Uncle David sent Constable a long letter packed with details of how he might improve his Nayland altarpiece – this had begun as an Agony in the Garden but on Watts’s advice became Christ Blessing the Bread and Wine. The general tone of the letter was as always outspoken but friendly and Constable didn’t let it upset him.21 In any event, Mrs Constable congratulated her son on a picture which she hoped would make certain his fame.
Despite his uncle’s help, 1808 didn’t bring Constable any notable accession to fame and fortune. In fact, even with his frugality, he was having trouble making ends meet on what his father gave him. Mrs Constable was apparently asked to use her influence to have the parental allowance boosted without giving Golding Constable reason to demand John abandon his artistic career. Abram, his younger brother, was also an intermediary. He sent on ‘the needful’ cash which Mr Constable now provided and wrote in a letter, ‘You know money comes loath from our Father, & that he thinks any sum a great one.’ Well into 1810 Golding Constable continued to believe that his son was pursuing a shadow in wanting to be a painter, and he wasn’t wrong in thinking that most of the work his son managed to get came from the kindness of friends. John sent – as requested by Abram – a grateful acknowledgement for the money to his father. This got him a pleased thanks from his mother, who also sent some shirts she had made for him; she was concerned about the depth of the cambric frills which fashion seemed to demand and which were deeper than any she had ever made. She had more serious anxieties about Mr Constable’s health: he had a bad cold, shortness of breath, and a troublesome cough, all of which she blamed on his work on the new floodgates at Flatford Mill. Other health news in the village included the prevalence of measles. It had ‘proved fatal only to Mrs Barnard’s little boy, which caused her great vexation’, wrote Ann Constable, ‘but the loss appears as if it would ere long be supply’d’.
Constable was now living in Percy Street off Tottenham Court Road and seems to have been summoned for possible military duty to protect his native soil. But actual service was avoided; a clerk in the Middlesex Militia provided a certificate that he had found a substitute to act for him, one James West.22 It makes one wonder just how accurate was the judgement of Bishop Fisher’s wife at this time in commenting that Constable looked guileless, ‘like one of the figures in the works of Raphael’.23 Our hero reappeared in East Bergholt in the late summer of 1808 and walked to his favourite sites to once again paint and draw. An oil-on-paper painting of Dedham Vale from Gun Hill with simplified trees and broadly observed meadows seems to date from this time. Plein-air painting was becoming fashionable and even paintings of agricultual scenery were beginning to be seen with less objection. Albeit primarily still ‘only’ a landscape painter, Constable for a change was for once not entirely fighting the tide when he returned to open-air oil sketching.24
Farington continued to encourage him, though sometimes the help took a negative form. On 3 April 1809 the Dictator of the Academy advised Constable not to send in a large painting he had done of Borrowdale, because it looked unfinished. On 28 March 1810 Farington called on Constable ‘& saw 3 Landscapes painted for the Exhibition (rural subjects) & recommended to him to imitate nature & not to be affected by loose remarks of critics’.25 Constable would probably have been glad of any critical notice, but so far the press hadn’t bothered with him much: as noted, only the St James’s Chronicle in 1807 had given him more than a passing mention. But his 1810 submisssions were pruned from three to two. One was a painting of the porch and graveyard of East Bergholt church, showing a group of figures in conversation by a tomb and the porch sundial in bright sunlight – the motto on the dial, Ut umbra sic vita (Life is like a shadow), Constable reserved for a later mezzotint. It was a lovely painting of strong contrasts, and didn’t make a meal of the symbolism of time passing and life’s inevitable end. The other painting he sent in was a landscape which The Examiner described as ‘a chaste, silver toned picture … a singular but pleasing view of water flowing between two trees’. Constable was probably more thrilled by the fact that he sold this picture for thirty guineas to the Earl of Dysart, admittedly his patron as a portrait copyist but also the collector of Reynolds and Gainsborough, and someone recognised by the Ipswich Journal as ‘an advocate for native genius’.26 Constable’s cup no doubt ran over when Farington and Stothard both advised h
im to put his name in for the next elections of Associates of the Academy. Progress! – or so it seemed until November, when he failed to be elected.
In March 1810 he moved to new accommodation at 49 Frith Street. Among his acquaintances was Henry Monro, a nineteen-year-old RA student and son of Dr Thomas Monro whose patronage and hospitality had assisted many young artists, including Tom Girtin and William Turner.27 Constable was occasionally invited to dinner at Dr Monro’s quarters in the Adelphi, and this gave him a sense of having his foot on an important ladder. He had also been seeing a lot of Wilkie, Haydon and Jackson. Wilkie in particular became a good friend, strolling with Constable to Somerset House, going to the theatre with him, getting Constable to model for him (as the doctor in his painting The Sick Lady), and taking an admiring interest in some of Constable’s sketches.28 Haydon presented a more difficult challenge. Constable felt that Haydon, the self-proclaimed practitioner of High Art, had too much influence over Wilkie. But any long-term friendship between Constable and Haydon had two further obstacles: Constable, despite little initial success, remained devoted to the Royal Academy, while Haydon’s animosity against that institution was growing self-destructive. Friendly relations were further undermined by Haydon’s immense vanity. He once asked Constable why he was so anxious about what he was achieving as an artist. ‘Think,’ said Haydon, his megalomania admitting of only one possible subject of interest, ‘of what I am doing!’29 In April 1809 Haydon – coming up against Constable’s own fierce sense of self-worth – renounced Constable’s acquaintance; he had learned that Constable had been telling people (specifically Northcote) that he had warned Haydon not to belittle John Jackson – another fellow RA student and a portrait-painting protegé of Sir George Beaumont’s. Constable thought Jackson had generously helped Haydon get ahead. Haydon said that he was furious he had allowed Constable to wind himself into his acquaintance. Jackson like Wilkie was a fine talent but – unlike Haydon – modest with it; he wrote to Constable in 1810 hoping that Constable could join him in the New Forest for a couple of weeks of sketching and exploring, and though this invitation went begging, Jackson put Constable up in his Newman Street rooms in 1811 while Constable was looking for new lodgings.30
Constable travelled to various connections and relations in the summer of 1809. He went to Malvern Hall, near Solihull, to stay with Henry Greswolde Lewis, its owner and brother of the dowager Countess of Dysart. There he painted a portrait of Lewis in a cravat and turned-up fur collar and several pictures of the Hall, with rooks flying overhead. (Constable noticed rooks: he later told Bishop Fisher’s nephew John that the cawing of a rook was a ‘voice which instantaneously placed my youth before me’.) His main job at Malvern Hall was to paint a portrait of Lewis’s thirteen-year-old ward, Mary Freer. Apart from the hands and arms, which seem unfinished or have been badly cleaned, this stunning picture makes one feel that Constable could have been one of the best portrait painters of the age, up with Reynolds, Romney and Lawrence. Sitting brush in hand a few feet in front of the vibrant Mary Freer did he feel an echo of another young woman, Maria Bicknell, who had been about the same age as Mary when he first met her? Constable also spent time during the summer with the Gubbinses in Epsom – two of his Gubbins cousins were in the army, as were two of his Watts cousins – and the picture he painted there now showed his growing originality as a landscape artist as well.
The Gubbinses were planning an East Bergholt trip, as were the Whalleys, and Mrs Constable encouraged John to turn up as well, bringing home with him anything that needed mending; new collars and wristbands could be stitched on. She kept him abreast of family news, telling him of the repairs Golding was planning at Dedham Mill ‘for the benefit of succeeders’, i.e. his children. She let John know that the Constable vessel Telegraph was loading at Mistley and that his old headmaster, Dr Grimwood, had died ‘after a fortnight’s severe indisposition’. East Bergholt was much the same as ever, ‘oft times a christening, seldom a burying’, and she hoped a catalogue of the RA exhibition would make its way there by ‘some friendly means!!’ Dunthorne was as impecunious as ever but he and his family were well; his new inn sign for the Duke of Marlborough in Dedham was capital. She made a point of enclosing some cash ‘for travelling extras from an affectionate mother’.
Constable got to East Bergholt that autumn. In early October the weather was fine, good for sketching out of doors. He stayed in Suffolk into December, and his reluctance to leave the village for London was not just because of outdoor sketching or getting together with his old friend Dunthorne. Staying again at the rectory was Dr Rhudde’s granddaughter, Maria Bicknell. The sometimes intimidating rector had been ‘unusually kind & courteous’, according to Constable’s mother in mid-June, even taking a letter from Mrs Constable to her son in London; but Dr Rhudde may not have realised that the reason for Constable’s continued presence in East Bergholt lay in the rector’s household. Nine years had passed since Constable had first met Maria Bicknell, a mere girl, who was now twenty-one. That Constable, thirty-three, took a new and perhaps suddenly amorous interest in her may simply have been because she had become a pretty young woman. Or it may have had to do with the fact that she had rematerialised as such on his own doorstep, just over the hedge that divided the Constable gardens from the rectory land; she was, evidently, an indispensable part of his world. In the next few weeks they met often and strolled together in the wooded gardens of the rectory and the more open gardens of East Bergholt House. They walked through the surrounding fields and along the small stream called the Rhyber. And at some point he told her he loved her.31
Was it mere chance that two high points in Constable’s life coincided? Finding out that he loved Maria Bicknell seems to have come together with the end of his long journeyman stage as a landscape painter. Of course, we can’t say which was cause and which effect – it may be that being in love liberated his abilities as an artist; or, perhaps, finally ‘finding himself’ as a painter gave him the confidence to approach Maria as a suitor.
4. A Cure for Love (1810–13)
AT THE START the relationship met with approval all round. Mrs Constable thought Maria very much the right thing and invited her and one of her sisters to tea at East Bergholt House. However, like most mothers she also felt the need to urge caution on her son who was, apart from a small commission or sale now and then, entirely dependent for his livelihood on the allowance from his father. On 15 March 1810, while applauding what seemed to her the expression of more energy than usual in John’s last letter, she warned him against being – as Dr Grimwood would have had it – dreamy: ‘You must exert yourself if you feel a desire to be independent – and you must also be wary how you engage in uniting yourself with a house mate, as well as in more serious & irrevocable yokes.’ Back in London, Constable called at the Bicknells’ house in Spring Gardens Terrace, a fashionable address near St James’s Park. His mother twice reminded him to pay his respects to Maria’s grandfather at his town house in Stratton Street when he was in residence there as a chaplain-in-ordinary to George III. (East Bergholt church was often left in the care of one of several curates Dr Rhudde retained.) With one such nudge, Mrs Constable added, ‘How soon and how easily is friendship shipwreck[ed].’ Mr Constable had recently had a neighbourly difference with Dr Rhudde, which Mrs Constable presumably recalled when she wryly referred to the rector as ‘the Great Pacificator’, and she didn’t want these difficulties affecting John and Maria. Meanwhile, John Constable went walking in the park with Maria. Her father was an important man, a solicitor to the Prince Regent and a lawyer for the Admiralty. Maria’s mother was his second wife; there were three children from his first marriage and five from this, with Maria – born in January 1788 – the eldest. For a while the Bicknells seemed pleased with Maria’s admirer. Constable called at Mr Bicknell’s office – in Norfolk Street, off the Strand – as well as in Spring Gardens, and Mr Bicknell – checking up? – dropped by at Constable’s lodgings in Frith Street. (Mrs Constab
le now worried about the suitability of these rooms. They were, she thought, ‘not respectable enough for the money you pay’.)
The crucial figure in what might happen, as Mrs Constable had recognised, was Maria’s grandfather. Durand Rhudde, from a clerical family, had been a poor scholar at Cambridge and had had to work part-time in order to graduate. He had served in several ecclesiastical posts before being made incumbent of East Bergholt and Brantham in 1782. These livings had brought him a free house and a considerable income, but his present wealth and consequent power had largely come about through the marriage of his sister to an extremely wealthy man, William Bogdani. Mr and Mrs Bogdani had both died in 1790 without children, leaving their Suffolk farms to the Reverend Rhudde and his daughter, Charles Bicknell’s wife.1 So the Rector had the wherewithal to keep good horses and buy fancy carriages in which he drove around the countryside, travelled back and forth to London, and went for holidays in up-and-coming seaside resorts such as Cromer. In the village, where the fact that he had two curates made an impression and the sermons he gave when in residence were admired by large congregations, he was regarded with humour, awe and even a touch of terror. John Lott, brother of the Flatford farmer Willy Lott, called Dr Rhudde ‘the Grand Caesar’.2
Such an imperial power had to be kept sweet and Mrs Constable made an effort. She welcomed the rector’s invitations to ride in his carriage with him on her way home from London after visiting the Whalleys, and she accepted his offers to carry letters and parcels to town for John to collect. She kept an eye on doings at the rectory and let John know about them. In early January 1811 she wrote, ‘The Revd Doctor complains very much of rheumatism & old age – but I scarcely ever saw him looking better, or preach with more delightful energy than on Xmas Day and that after assisting Mr Kebbell [one of the curates] in the Sacrament to 150 communicants.’ But the rector’s wife was ‘very sadly’, suffering it seems from senile dementia. Word reached Mrs Constable via William Travis, the village physician, who had heard it from Thomas, one of the Rhuddes’ servants, that Mrs Rhudde thought some of the Bicknells were poisoning her food. Her place as hostess at the rectory began to be taken by a local widow, Mrs Everard, whose attentions to the curates had been noted by Mrs Constable – was Mrs Everard aspiring to higher things?
John Constable Page 6
