John Constable

by Anthony Bailey

  Mrs Constable received from her son a watercolour he had recently done of East Bergholt church and she immediately recognised this drawing as a useful weapon. She had Abram take it back to London so that John could make a copy of it. The copy came to East Bergholt a month later, and John Dunthorne was asked to inscribe a small plaque for the frame: ‘A South East view of East Bergholt Church, a drawing by John Constable & presented in testimony of respect to Durand Rhudde D.D. the Rector. February 26, 1811.’ Mrs Constable herself took the watercolour round to the rectory, where Dr Rhudde declared it was ‘most beautiful’ and expressed his pride in possessing it. However, when it dawned on him that he was especially obliged to Constable, its begetter, for the gift, he felt things were getting out of balance; he wrote, sending Constable a banknote, and attempted to smooth over any awkwardness by suggesting that the artist might use the money to purchase ‘some little article by which you may be reminded of me, when I am no more’.

  Mortality was indeed making itself felt all round. Dr Rhudde’s wife died on 19 March 1811. Their daughter, Maria’s mother, wasn’t well, and Maria’s twenty-year-old brother, also named Durand, succumbed to tuberculosis and died in April this same year. Maria, distressed, went to Worcestershire to stay with her half-sister, Mrs Sarah Skey. The Bicknells may have begun to feel the John–Maria attachment could do with cooling off. Meanwhile, the winter was long and icy, with deep drifts of snow and the Telegraph frozen in at Mistley. Mrs Constable sent her son money for coal and worried about him on many counts, some real, some imaginary; she was anxious both about his being smitten by Maria and by dangers to his health. Was he keeping his feet dry in the dreadful London streets? Sitting in damp shoes and stockings brought on sore throats, lung inflammation and toothache, she said. But Mr Constable, suffering from a nasty cough and neuralgia, had other concerns: in late April the mate of the Telegraph, Zacariah Savell, had been taken by a Navy press gang and despite being a ‘protected person’ because of his duties in the coastal trade, was being held on shipboard at the Nore anchorage. Golding Constable asked his son to call on Mr Bicknell at the Admiralty and find out if strings could be pulled to save Savell. What resulted from this intervention is unknown, but in 1818, after the war was over, Savell was in command of a Constable vessel.

  The 1811 Academy exhibition made Constable uneasy. He had entered the largest painting he had so far submitted, Dedham Vale: Morning, a wide-angle view of the Stour valley, a view out of shadow into early-morning light, showing cattle browsing as they are led by a herdsman along the lane from Flatford to Bergholt, with a milestone (which he had used in this way before) showing the name of the place, Dedham Vale, inscribed as on a classical monument. A Claudean tree frames the scene on the left. If this was the morning of his life, he should have been happier, but he gave the impression of being love-sick and badly pining with it. The painting wasn’t placed to his satisfaction at the Academy – he complained to Farington that it was hung too low in the ante-room. He thought this showed his stock was low with Academicians. Farington tried to encourage him, telling him that Lawrence, the celebrated portrait painter and later the RA President, had twice mentioned the picture approvingly.3 However, as Leslie was to note, the painting didn’t clamour for attention. Constable was up against the fact that people found his works unobtrusive; they didn’t at once spot the originality and quality that coexisted with being low-key.

  Maria was not at Spring Gardens, London, but at Spring Grove, near Bewdley, Worcestershire, with Mrs Skey, so Constable had nothing to keep him in Frith Street. He went to Bergholt for three weeks in May and painted ‘from nature’. When he returned to town in early June he obviously felt unsettled. He told Farington that on coming back to London he had gone at once to the exhibition again to see what effect art had upon him after a period of studying nature. At Somerset House he had seen ‘many pictures which were altogether works of art, such as might be painted by studying pictures only’.4 And yet he wasn’t immune from the vice, if such it was, of thinking in terms of pictures. In Suffolk, he said, ‘a most delightful landscape for a painter … I fancy I see Gainsborough in every hedge and hollow tree’.5 In fact, despite his proclaimed attachment to Nature, his view of the country became increasingly sophisticated; and his eye was far from innocent. The engraver John Burnet later wrote of Constable that ‘No one, perhaps, has given a greater look of studying Nature alone … but he told me he seldom painted a picture without considering how Rembrandt or Claude would have treated it’.6

  On 6 June he again talked to Farington, telling him of ‘the particular circumstances of his situation in life’. They also discussed Constable’s uncle David Pike Watts, who wanted him to pass on to the architect (and Academician) Robert Smirke information about a new church in Marylebone. Watts had recently lost his second son Michael, an ensign in the Coldstream Guards, at Barrosa, south of Cadiz; his oldest son David, also an army officer, had died on shipboard going to Jamaica in 1808.7 Watts bore the new loss firmly, thought Constable, and his uncle went on concerning himself with the fortunes of his artistic nephew. For Constable’s thirty-fifth birthday Watts sent him a printed leaflet, ‘A Cure for Love’, and a lengthy homily he had written on his nephew’s health and happiness, salted with biblical and of-the-moment political references:

  It is signified by the inspired writer of the Psalms, that in times of public calamity, when War distresses a Kingdom from without, and Dissipation corrupts it within, when the Necessities of Life become expensive, and Rents & Taxes consume a great share of Income; that the natural Affection of Love and the endearments of conjugal union, suffer disappointment and are often cross’d by Circumstances …8

  A second letter lectured Constable on his art:

  That dread of being a mannerist, and that desire of being an original, has not, in my imperfect judgment, produced to you the full advantage you promised yourself from it … My opinion is, that cheerfulness is wanted in your landscapes; they are tinctured with a sombre darkness. If I may say so, the trees are not green, but black; the water is not lucid, but overshadowed; an air of melancholy is cast over the scene, instead of hilarity.9

  One might resist the suggestion that Constable make his works hilarious, but the thrust of Uncle David’s remarks – ‘Lighten up, John!’ – can be admitted. And perhaps could have been admitted by the artist himself if Constable hadn’t been the person he was, touched with darkness.

  Watts continued to take Constable’s part in his feeling for Miss Bicknell and tried to bolster his confidence. He wrote, ‘Though you are miserable yet you are a man. If you weakly sink that heroic character, you would have been a feeble Prop to a Woman who puts herself in your Protection. Arise! revive! …’10

  Constable went down to Bergholt again in time to catch the village fair at the end of July. While there he painted several vivid, atmospheric oil sketches that would perhaps have struck Uncle David as cheerful. He then spent three weeks in September with Bishop Fisher and his family at the Bishop’s Palace, Salisbury, where he was commissioned to paint the Bishop’s portrait and got to know the Bishop’s nephew, also John, and also a churchman. He made sketches of Salisbury and its cathedral from Harnham Hill, a view that provided one of his RA exhibits in 1812 – Salisbury, Morning. Maria was still with the Skeys and no one answered when he called for news at Spring Gardens; Constable was desperate at not hearing from her or even hearing about her. So he took a giant step – Maria’s father hadn’t given his formal permission for Constable to write – and sent Maria a letter. Some of the strict rules then governing a relationship between a young man and woman were laid out in a novel published that year, Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility: ‘A correspondence between them by letter could subsist only under a positive engagement.’ Maria was not officially engaged and she replied to Constable with off-putting caution: ‘Let me beg and entreat you to think of me no more but as one who will ever esteem you as a friend.’ She didn’t want to make her parents unhappy. What she called ‘t
he delusion’ to which she had long given way must have an end. Constable at this stage buckled; he was sick, and felt he hadn’t been properly well since the last time he saw her. However, when she had returned to London and Constable called on the Bicknells, her father gave permission for John to write to her.

  This looked like a great advance, and Mrs Constable took it as such. But Maria was less optimistic. Her father was going to give her his thoughts and she warned Constable she would be guided by her father in every respect. And Mr Bicknell’s thoughts, when they came, were kind and reasonable and put forward but ‘one objection’. Maria wrote about this from the Skeys’ on 4 November 1811. Beginning the letter ‘My dear Sir’, she wrote that the problem was ‘that necessary article Cash … To live without it is impossible, it would be involving ourselves in misery instead of felicity.’ The problem was insuperable, she believed, and they had therefore better not write one another. The painful trials of life would have to be borne with resignation. ‘You will still be my friend, and I will be yours … We should both of us be bad subjects for poverty, should we not? Even Painting would go on badly, it could not survive in domestic worry.’ (She was a well-read young woman, and might have known the lines in The Winter’s Tale where Camillo says, ‘Besides, you know / Prosperity’s the very bond of love.’)

  Far from being thrown off his stride by this common sense, Constable was galvanised by it. His health improved. He went to Epsom to stay for a few days with the Gubbinses and breathe country air. He continued to attend life classes at the Royal Academy.11 He moved to 63 Charlotte Street, to rooms above the premises of an upholsterer, Richard Weight, and nearly opposite the house of his counsellor Joseph Farington. He seemed undaunted by the fact that in this year’s poll for Associate Members, he got no votes.12 He wrote to Maria from Charlotte Street – ‘Dear Miss Bicknell’ – confident he still had her unalterable affections: ‘Be assured we have only to consider our union as a circumstance that must happen and we shall yet be happy.’ How he wished he could see her! Then he went to East Bergholt to see his father, who had had a bad cold, and give his anxious mother an account of things. On his return to Charlotte Street in mid-December he wrote to Maria that he was still painting: ‘Nothing so much as employment will keep the mind from preying on itself.’ And he had hopes that good would result from all this, including ‘advancement in the art I love, and more deserving of you’. For him there was, evidently, no necessity to choose between Art and Love, one or the other.

  Life drawing, female nude

  For the moment, however, Maria wasn’t to be budged. She was grieved and surprised that he persevered with ‘an idea that must terminate in disappointment’. Her father thought they should put an end to their correspondence and that this would make them happier! Maria begged Constable to stop thinking of her; he should forget that he had ever known her; and she concluded her letter with the forlorn words, ‘Fare well, dear Sir, and ever believe me, Your sincere and constant well-wisher, M.E. Bicknell.’

  Quite what this rejection was meant to bring about, perhaps Maria alone knew. Unless that is she had been discussing the situation with her half-sister Sarah Skey and had some tactics in mind, particularly on how to circumvent the lack of Cash. But surely she didn’t expect Constable to knuckle under meekly. As it was, Uncle David would have approved the manly character he now showed. Five days before Christmas 1811 Constable took a coach to Worcester and went on to Bewdley and Spring Grove. Despite bad weather, he had a happy weekend with Maria, although sadness from knowing that she was worried about her parents’ attitude intruded from time to time. But Sarah Skey, five years a widow and the mother of two small boys, was all kindness. Constable was cheered by seeing Maria in her calming and supportive company. On getting back to Charlotte Street, he wrote to Maria (addressing her once again as ‘My dear Miss Bicknell’) on Christmas Eve, ‘I too well know the effect that hours of desponding have upon the health not to see the necessity of making every exertion for the present – ’till it shall please providence to bring us together.’

  Thomas Stothard called on Constable on the same day and thought the younger artist was depressed from being too much on his own. Constable agreed and invited his sister Mary to come and stay with him. She arrived on 2 January. He also had a loving end-of-year letter from his father. Golding Constable asked his son if he could really afford a wife and children. Mr Constable suggested that John not give up his ‘female acquaintance in toto’ but defer a permanent connection ‘until some removals had taken place’. He didn’t specify which removals, but the deaths of some older people would undoubtedly help Constable’s circumstances. Moreover, he wished John would think of what parts of his profession paid best. He believed his son’s anxiety to excel made him raise his aspirations too high. ‘Think less and finish as you go,’ was his pragmatic advice. Three weeks later this ‘parent and sincere friend’, as he called himself, sent his son practical help in the form of a twenty-pound cheque, which John for some reason failed to cash. Meanwhile, his mother continued to do her own worrying. She wrote on 16 February to say that she hoped Maria would become ‘another amiable and good daughter’ for her in her lifetime, and she urged Constable to use the now lengthening days of the six-week period before the next Academy exhibition to work hard and ‘secure his fame’.

  Maria returned to London in early January and Constable took every opportunity to see her, often hanging around in St James’s Park in hope of meeting her. She wrote on one occasion to say she was happy enough knowing she was in the same town as he; she preferred accidental meetings to painful premeditated appointments (which her parents didn’t know about and which couldn’t always be kept). But eventually the strain told, and she felt it was better for her health and peace of mind to be in Spring Grove rather than Spring Gardens. In Worcestershire she could look at a portrait he had given her of himself and think of him ‘steadfastly pursuing painting’. In town she would be distressed and he would be tormented. ‘Think my dear Sir of the number of wasted hours spent in the Park, think what an unsettled being I am rendered.’

  It is unclear whether Maria’s health entered the reckoning at this stage or whether her family’s desire to keep her at a safe remove was the main factor. In any event, it was off to Worcestershire for her again; on 20 February she wrote from Spring Gardens to say adieu. Constable seems to have waited a whole month before replying to her, no longer ‘Dear Miss Bicknell’ but ‘My dearest Maria’. He had an astonishing ability to put his painting before everything, and now he was absorbed with a view of Salisbury and three other landscapes for the Academy exhibition as well as some portrait commissions. His letter of 21 March said he was trying to follow her advice and this commitment, together with hard work, had to support him ‘in this gloom of solitude’. But in April, May and June the letters flashed back and forth between Charlotte Street and Spring Grove. In one, he said that though he was denied the pleasure of talking to her as they walked, with her arm locked in his, ‘yet we have had that pleasure and may yet again for many years’.

  Mrs Constable through all this tried to ensure that the rector was kept on side. She worried that although Dr Rhudde was all politeness, smiling and bowing when he encountered her and her husband, ‘yet something still rankles at his heart’, and she feared that whatever it was might burst out. She may also have been concerned about how Dr Rhudde’s rheumatism might effect his equilibrium. Yet when she wrote to her son on 12 April 1812, she was pleased that John had called at the rector’s London residence in Stratton Street and left his card; it was the sort of courtesy that might help avoid any impending rupture. She also passed on a bit of news that might amuse Constable: the rector’s gardener, Peck, had the previous week rearranged the raised flower beds outside Dr Rhudde’s study windows so that they took the form of two large hearts. This had provoked the rector’s new self-appointed helpmeet Mrs Everard to exclaim, ‘Truly ridiculous!’ But Mrs Constable had no objection to the doctor being touched by Cupid: ‘I
t may cause him to have a fellow feeling for others in the same situation.’

  Mrs Constable made sure that the rector heard of the portrait her son was painting of Dr Fisher, the Bishop of Salisbury. At the same time, Mr Constable was worried by a newspaper article critical of John’s work – it complained of lack of finish – but he put this down to his son’s unhappy love life. Constable’s paintings were in fact garnering approval. West, the Academy President, praised the four he exhibited at the Academy; Constable thought they were decently hung, and he turned the other cheek to Callcott’s comment that they looked ‘rather dark and heavy’. The Examiner particularly liked his Flatford Mill from the Lock, though ‘it wants a little more carefulness of execution’.13 Writing to Maria at the end of May, John said he hoped to get to Suffolk soon and paint there for most of the summer: ‘You know I have succeeded most with my native scenes. They have always charmed me & I hope they always will – I wish not to forget early impressions.’

  Nevertheless his burgeoning popularity as a portrait painter made for chores. The Godfreys in East Bergholt liked Constable’s portrait of their son and recommended the artist to General Rebow, in Wivenhoe, and he asked Constable to paint his seven-year-old daughter Mary. The Dysart portrait-copying duties also paid a dividend: the Countess wanted him to paint her, and so did her daughter Lady Heathcote. Captain Thomas Western of the Royal Navy, who lived not far away in Suffolk, was soon on the list, and there was a copy to make of the portrait of Bishop Fisher. One portrait seemed to prompt another; word of mouth reported that Constable was talented, and no doubt it was added quietly that his charges were reasonable. For him the portraits brought in ‘cash’ and therefore were rewarded with Golding Constable’s approval. But he felt John should stop concentrating on unpropitious landscapes and feared the connection with Maria would be his son’s ruin. He now made an effort to tempt him to leave London – if Constable did so, he could have the mill house at Dedham to live in. However, Constable wrote to Maria that he wouldn’t leave the field while he had a leg to stand on. As for his father’s suggestions, ‘His ideas are most rational, but you know Landscape is my mistress – ’tis to her that I look for fame.’