In mid-February Maria told Constable that she wouldn’t see him again until May. He prayed she would at any rate write to him: ‘No lover will ever think no news good news.’ She replied it was improper for them to walk out together. But a young woman’s right to change her mind was soon manifest. In March she reserved some seats at Covent Garden Theatre and wrote to Constable, ‘Can you my dear John brave these cold nights without any danger of getting cold?’ She had ‘secured places in box 36 up one pair of stairs. March 17th.’ The play the lovers saw was ‘not calculated to cheer one’, John wrote, hoping ‘the next will be a comedy’. Meanwhile, he was fence-mending with the rector. Constable called on Dr Rhudde in Stratton Street and found him coolly polite as always and not exactly encouraging.
Towards the end of April Constable handed in two landscapes as his entries for the Academy exhibition. The first, Ploughing Scene in Suffolk, shows a field on the Bergholt slopes of Dedham Vale, with a team of horses pulling a plough. After summer ploughing the field remained fallow until it was manured in the autumn and sown for the winter. The picture was given a quotation in the exhibition catalogue – the first time Constable had done this, perhaps taking note of how successful Academicians such as Turner promoted their pictures that way. Constable used two lines from The Farmer’s Boy by the best-selling Suffolk poet Robert Bloomfield: ‘But unassisted through each toilsome day, / With smiling brow the ploughman cleaves his way.’ Just how smiling the ploughman might be after a day’s toil is a moot point – his brow is invisible – but the painting itself is a wonderful example of how Constable could mimic the conditions of one season in the country while working in the city in another. A small low copse makes a not-quite-horizontal slash of darkness across the picture’s middle ground. Large loose clouds allow pools of sunlight to illuminate distant meadows and part of the ‘summerland’ field in which the ploughman stoops over his plough. England was probably never better and more beautifully cultivated than now, and Constable caught the moment.
After handing in this, and a slightly darker and moodier scene showing Willy Lott’s cottage and a ferryman poling his boat across the Stour at Flatford, Constable went up to Suffolk for a week. He told Maria that Bergholt looked ‘uncommonly beautifull’; he took ‘several beautifull walks’ and rode with his sister Mary to visit the Earl and Countess of Dysart at Helmingham Hall. When he returned to London he called at Somerset House to check on his creations. Sam Strowger, one of his best friends there, had been pleased to tell him that some paintings had been moved since their proximity injured the effect of Constable’s.5 Constable himself was happy with ‘the look and situation’ of Ploughing Scene. Although Turner’s Dido and Aeneas was getting a lot of attention, he said that he would rather be the author of his own landscape with the ploughman. Many Academicians thought his Ploughing Scene ‘as genuine a peice of study as there is to be found in the room’. John Allnutt, wine merchant and stockbreeder of Clapham Common, a perceptive art patron, liked it too and bought it at the following winter’s BI exhibition. Allnutt, even more than James Carpenter, was a complete stranger to the artist, and this lack of prior connections particularly delighted Constable. Was a public coming to him at last?
The 1814 Academy exhibition involved Constable in one disagreeable incident. Maria visited it with her father, and when Constable encountered them, he failed to greet Mr Bicknell with a bow. His omission was taken for disrespect. Constable thought that, as the younger man (albeit almost thirty-eight), he was merely refraining from pushing himself forward in an impertinent manner. Maria was cross, but Constable explained and apologised; he hadn’t intended any slight. Then she relented – the way Constable now mentioned her father made her happy, and it was a pity that ‘existing circumstances should preclude your being better acquainted’. The circumstances, a note from her on 18 May made clear, included their continued lack of ‘that most necessary evil, money’. (A lack spelled out a month later when she added that ‘people cannot live now upon four hundred a year’.) And the circumstances made both parties ultra-sensitive. When Constable suggested he might visit Maria when she and Louisa were staying at Richmond, she said no; he complained she wasn’t the Maria he once knew, and this made her miserable. But a few weeks later, when he was again in Suffolk, she wrote him a ‘truly affectionate’ letter that made him happy.
East Bergholt in June: although cut off from her, he knew that he was ‘among every blessing and endearment that can be found in this world’. Not only was he with his family but he had ‘health and leisure to pursue my “longings after fame”, in these dear scenes which I must always prefer and love to any other … The village is now in great beauty. I think I never saw the foliage so promising.’ Constable spent most of the summer there. He made one trip in June to visit the Reverend W.W. Driffield at Feering. Reverend Driffield, who had christened Constable as an endangered infant, took him south to Maldon and Southend. Constable walked along the banks of the Thames estuary and delighted in ‘the melancholy grandeur of a seashore’. He wrote to Maria, ‘At Hadleigh there is a ruin of a castle which from its situation is a really fine place – it commands a view of the Kent hills, the Nore and North Foreland & looking many miles to sea.’ He spent the second half of July in London, where he lobbied Farington about becoming an Associate and Farington told him a common objection to his pictures was that they were unfinished – Constable should study Claude’s manner of completing. This was advice Constable could go along with – and it was no hardship to look at the two Claudes of J.J. Angerstein in Pall Mall.6
Maria had been invited to Wales in the autumn and Constable entreated her – ‘my beloved Child’ – to go. But instead she went with Louisa first to a house her father had rented in Wimbledon and then to Brighton, for sea air. She and Constable managed to meet once in London. He was very low in spirits, particularly as she told him she wouldn’t see him again for a time: ‘It would not you know have been right, for Louisa and I only to have admitted so formidable a personage under our roof, the village would have rose in arms to our relief.’ So he spent the following few months mostly in East Bergholt, avoiding people other than such visiting relatives as the Whalleys and the Gubbinses. James Gubbins, now an army captain, was his favourite cousin and had stories to tell of his brother Richard, who had been at the capture of Washington. His family was anxious ‘lest he should be knocked on the head by those wretched Americans.’ Constable knew he was being unsociable, for example when he begged to be let off a dinner with the curate Mr Robertson, and he was happy to be – as he told Maria – ‘almost entirely in the fields’. He had an object to pursue that filled his mind and precluded melancholy. The landscapes he was at work on were better than usual – his work was consolation for not being with her – and though he had seen her only once since spring, he hoped winter would bring more cheering prospects. ‘And when this unnatural and useless persecution which now embitters both our lives, shall have [ceased] we shall yet be happy … I can hardly tell you what I feel at the sight from the window where I am now writing of the feilds in which we have so often walked. A beautifull calm autumnal setting sun is glowing upon the gardens of the Rectory and on adjacent feilds where some of the happiest hours of my life were passed.’ He didn’t need to add ‘with you’.
Among the paintings he did that wonderfully fine summer and autumn were several that had old subject matter but seemingly new inspiration. Farington might have claimed his admonition to study Claude was paying off. Constable, impelled by love, was perhaps simply digging deeper in his own ground. A manure pile, symbol of good husbandry, figured in the foreground of a picture of the Stour valley that he painted for Philadelphia Godfrey, daughter of Peter Godfrey of Old Hall; it was a gift from her husband-to-be, a landowner named Thomas Fitzhugh, so that she would have at her new home in London a view from her old home in Suffolk. Constable usually wrote to Maria on Sundays but occasionally gave in to the temptations of fine weather, as on 25 October when he walked through the woods to
Nayland to visit his invalid aunt. He knew Maria’s curiosity was piqued by Miss Godfrey’s marriage and several times he wrote to pass on titbits. He let her know, for example, that Mr Fitzhugh was ‘extremely rich … and a college friend of Mr Godfrey’s. I beleive he is near thirty years older than Miss G [he was in fact forty-four years old] but in the plenitude of his wealth that was not thought of … I am told there is a very great attachment between them.’
The chief product of his Bergholt painting season was Boat-Building. A pencil sketch for this was made in early September beside the excavated dry dock, near Flatford Mill, where barges were constructed for Constable’s father’s grain and coal business. The actual painting was done entirely in the open air; as he later told the engraver David Lucas, he worked all afternoon until smoke from a nearby chimney announced fire being lit for the preparation of supper.7 As with the painting for Miss Godfrey, Constable dealt in the detail of work, though here it was not moving manure but making a barge in its pit – a massive wooden-shoe of a craft, almost an ark, being born. Timbers were being hewn with saw and adze, and pitch was being heated in an iron pot for caulking the planking. The fabric of the huge boat is precisely rendered. The green shadows suggest it is afternoon. The fertile ground here was not Squire Godfrey’s but Golding Constable’s, whose artist son may have been honouring some of the tools of the trades that were used in Constable businesses and helped pay his own allowance.
When he left the village in early November, Constable told Maria that his mother thought regretfully that her son’s propensity to avoid notice seemed to have increased. He acknowledged that although five or six years before he had been ‘a little on tiptoe for fame and emolument’, he wasn’t any longer seeking honours. This attitude made Maria cross. She didn’t see how he could congratulate himself on it. She believed it strange that a professional man should shun society the way he did; it wouldn’t help him get ahead. If he wanted to remain single, fair enough. But she wanted him noticed, and, arranging to meet the recluse in mid-November in St James’s Square, she added: ‘I must have you known, and then to be admired will be the natural consequence.’ Possibly Constable was preparing himself for what by now seemed natural disappointment, which quickly came. In the elections for Associate members of the Royal Academy, he once again failed. Worse, one of the two successful candidates was Richard Ramsay Reinagle, who had an easy victory; this was anguish indeed.8
While Constable readjusted to London’s ‘brick walls and dirty streets’, Mrs Constable wrote to tell him of the 5 November celebrations in the village: ‘plenty of squibs and crackers … but no bonfires.’ She was worried about Maria returning from her stay in Brighton and the effect on her son: ‘I dread your waiting jobs under the Lady’s window for fear of colds & pains in the face & teeth.’ A month later she let him know that his father had again been thinking about the uncertainties of John’s profession and – to ‘make his death bed easy’ – was planning to put one or two thousand pounds into an annuity for his son. Mr Constable wasn’t well during the early winter; in the new year he was bothered by poor circulation resulting in chilblains, though he retained a ‘composed state of mind – no perplexities within, & every comfort without’. Constable was warned his father showed ‘symptoms of dissolution’ – even Dr Rhudde sent to ask how he was – and he made a quick visit to Bergholt to see the seventy-seven-year-old merchant. However, by mid-February Mr Travis, the local doctor, decided that Mr Constable was out of the woods; the poultice on his foot was removed; his toes were healed. Soon he was having ‘tollerable good nights’ and was behaving ‘very mild and kind’.
The fact that Constable and Maria Bicknell exchanged few letters in the first months of 1815 suggests that they were managing to meet quite frequently. In any event, Mr Bicknell now decided to stop fighting fate. Maria wrote on 23 February to give Constable the glad news that her father had given permission for her to receive him in their Spring Gardens house as ‘an occasional visitor’. This was insufficient for Constable, who held out for a personal invitation from Mr Bicknell. He had been formally dismissed, ‘with expressions the most mortifying to a man of honor’, and he wanted to be formally assured he would be welcome. (He could be just as unbending as Maria’s father and grandfather.) Constable’s mother didn’t make too much of this semi-acceptance of her son as a satisfactory suitor. She reminded Constable to remember Dr Rhudde’s birthday in early March with all due respects. She also took the side of Hannah Dunthorne in a contretemps she had had with John Dunthorne, her husband, telling Constable that she didn’t agree with him when he said, ‘Dunthorne’s old woman’s conduct has always been of the worst kind towards him.’ Mrs Constable protested that Hannah had taken in Dunthorne without a shilling and married him, putting him ‘in possession of her house, furniture, trade, and what very property she had’. He ought to be grateful. ‘I assure myself Miss B. would not countenance for a moment such a character.’
This was the last bit of maternal diplomacy Constable was subject to. On the cold morning of 9 March, Dr Rhudde’s 81st birthday, Ann Constable went outside after breakfast to do some gardening and felt giddy. She collapsed. It seems to have been a stroke for her voice was affected and her left side partly paralysed. Mr Travis attended to Mrs Constable on her sofa; he bled her, which proved a temporary relief, but she continued to weaken. Prayers were said for her at the Sunday evening service conducted by Reverend Robertson. Abram sent word to London to his brother John, who apparently followed their sister Martha to Bergholt. But Ann Constable lingered on, and they had both returned to London – Martha to look after her young family, John to work on his paintings for the upcoming RA exhibition – when they heard of their mother’s death at the end of March. She was not quite sixty-seven. She was buried on 4 April in the churchyard next door to her house.
Constable was not at the graveside. Possibly he felt it enough that he had been home just before when she was still alive and he was needed most. Possibly he was up to his neck in his painting and simply unable to do as Abram suggested, throw himself into the mail coach on Monday night to be with his family for the funeral on Tuesday. And possibly the sudden loss of his mother had shattered him, rendered him immobile; it was a Constable trait to turn inwards, in private grief, at such moments, as later events would show. Abram understood – John shouldn’t be uneasy about it – and sent news that Dunthorne went on as usual and their father was all the better for a letter John had written to him; he had got Abram to read it twice to him and ‘quite lighted up with pleasure’.
Soon Mr Constable had recovered enough from the loss of his wife to call in William Mason, the Colchester solicitor and husband of their relative Anne Parmenter. Mr Mason came several times to redraw Golding Constable’s will and lessen any difficulties that might arise on his death. Mr Constable wanted to leave Abram in charge of the business but give all his children equal shares in it. And on 6 May he wrote his son John a heartfelt letter. Addressing him as ‘Honest John’, he said his wife’s death had brought him also nearly to the grave but he was now stronger and had been out several times in his gig. ‘My breath at times is very short, but not more so than usual.’ He sounded particularly pleased with news of John’s paintings at the Academy. ‘Mrs Coyle of Dedham lent us a Catalogue of the Exhibition. She saw your pictures & spoke highly of them.’
That year Constable showed eight pictures, the maximum permitted. Boat-Building was one and the view of the Stour valley for Philadelphia Godfrey another. There were good notices with ‘reservations’ – ‘coarsely sketchy’ was The Examiner’s qualified admiration of Constable’s ‘sparkling sunlight’ and ‘general character of truth’, while The New Monthly Magazine liked his freshness and colouring but regretted that his performances, ‘from want of finish, are sketches rather than pictures’.9
Dr Rhudde was remarkably attentive to the Constables through this period. He enquired several times from Abram about Golding Constable during his illness, and when Constable went up to Eas
t Bergholt in mid-May to visit his father and paint his portrait, the rector spoke to him at the door of his pew in church and asked for news of Mr Constable. Was the rector’s bark worse than his bite? Or was the Great Caesar influenced by his own immediate grief. He had just preached ‘a most consolatory sermon’; his own daughter, Maria’s mother, had died nine days before in London. She had been an invalid for the past ten years but it was still a shock for many, including Constable. He wrote to Maria on 21 May, ‘That we should both of us have lost our nearest friends (the nearest we can ever have upon earth) within so short a time of each other is truly melancholy.’ It made him miss Maria all the more.
In the unsettled world beyond, where ‘that scoundrel Bonaparte’ as Abram called him was once again at large, other losses now affected the Constables. On 18 June the Battle of Waterloo took place. Constable spent the day at the Whalleys in East Ham, taken there by David Pike Watts. Two of Constable’s cousins, sons of his mother’s sisters, Lieutenant Thomas Allen and Captain James Gubbins, were on the bloody field. After a long and anxious wait, their families learned that Thomas had survived but James had not. James Gubbins, Constable said a few months after this, was one of the most interesting men he had known. Gubbins had run up great debts as a cavalry officer, but Constable’s mother had nevertheless been impressed by her nephew’s sense of style and had the previous Christmas sent John some home-made shirts, with collars cut in the up-to-date fashion approved by James Gubbins. It was first reported, in the Gentleman’s Magazine, that the captain had died after being hit by a cannonball, while leading his troop in a charge. Later, it was announced that his frightened horse had carried him into enemy lines where, although he surrendered, a French officer killed him. Constable’s pleasure that the day was saved for Britain (and for the forces of legitimate monarchy), preventing the overthrow of much he held dear, was thus balanced by his distress at the death of his cousin and so many of James’s comrades.
John Constable Page 9
