For the second year running it was a lovely summer. But Constable spent the first part of it indoors, in London, working twelve, sometimes fourteen hours a day on the background for a portrait by another artist: George Dawe’s portrait of the actress Eliza O’Neill, a current Juliet, propped up winsomely against a massive balustrade. At least being in London gave him the opportunity to see Maria, now staying in a cottage her father had rented in Putney; he met her on Putney Bridge on 3 July, a few days before leaving for Suffolk. From there he reported, ‘I never saw dear old Bergholt half so beautifull before as now.’ His father had felt buoyant enough on his son’s birthday to raise a glass, drinking the health of ‘the painter and his pictures’, but Travis the surgeon warned the family to beware of sudden change. As it was, Mr Constable was going on his usual rides and going to church, taking the sacrament. The village rumour mill was also working hard: word had it that Dr Rhudde had made a new will, leaving what had been intended for his daughter, Maria’s mother, to his son-in-law, Mr Bicknell, and granddaughters. The rector gave the impression of having a new broom to sweep with. On the Sunday after Mrs Bicknell’s death he told the congregation in his sermon that it was wrong at such points to have long lamentations.10
Constable’s father, Golding
After being stuck in the studio at Dawe’s, painting in the open air was wonderful for him – as Maria noted almost jealously in a letter of 20 July. Constable did an oil sketch at the annual village fair, when the locals celebrated the great victory over Napoleon with beef, beer, a band and fireworks, and by hanging the Corsican upstart in effigy.11 Among several out-of-doors scenes he painted slightly further afield were a sketch of Stoke-by-Nayland and a view of the hamlet of Brightwell, near Woodbridge. The latter was the result of a request from a clergyman and antiquary, the Reverend F.H. Barnwell, and Constable went there on an excursion that took in Framlingham Castle and Ipswich. The Brightwell picture shows ‘the church as it appears above a wood’ (as he wrote to Maria). It is a little gem, six and a half by nine inches, oil on panel. A lane winds into a dip between fields and scattered trees, with farm buildings on the right and the red-tiled roof and greystone tower of the church on the ridge-line horizon. It is a bright though slightly overcast day, the scene rendered boldly and simply, almost as if enamelled, with sharply contrasted areas of green vegetation and grey cloud. Happiness seemed to have improved Constable’s powers of concentration and focus. In late August, he wrote to Maria, ‘I live almost wholly in the feilds and see nobody but the harvest men.’ By mid-September, he was ‘perfectly bronzed’.
Two domestic views were apparently painted just before and after Brightwell: outdoors painted from indoors. They show the Constable family’s kitchen garden and flower garden, seen from an upstairs window in East Bergholt House, respectively in the morning and evening. They have the same intensity and brilliance as the Brightwell picture, cut into by deep areas of darkness. In the kitchen-garden painting, the rectory – Dr Rhudde’s house – can be seen in the central distance, with the Constable windmill on the horizon to the left.12 Although the fields where he and Maria had met in the first years of their getting to know one another may have been in his mind, it seems likely that his parents were in the forefront of his thoughts. Mrs Constable had been working in the gardens when she was struck with her fatal giddiness. Constable never exhibited or tried to sell these paintings. They give an almost elegiac sense of things he wanted to register as permanently as he could. It was as though he was looking at them for the last time, before they disappeared or he went away.
6. Ready to Marry – Perhaps (1815–17)
THE BICKNELL SUMMER household at Putney Heath had an addition. Maria, who was fond of dogs, reported happily, ‘We have got a little terrier, Frisk is his name, a great torment, and a great pet, he bites & destroys every thing he can lay hold of, we flatter ourselves that as he grows older, he will leave off all these tricks, even in trifles hope befriends us, it is the rainbow of the shower.’ But the sunny period of the dog’s life was short. He wasn’t well, and this made Constable worry in East Bergholt. (Frisk died in December.) Moreover, when Constable got back to town for a few days in early November and saw Maria at Spring Gardens, he wasn’t happy with the cold manner with which her father greeted him. He also had no encouragement in the Academy elections for Associates: he got no votes at all; Mulready and Jackson were elected.1 So it was back to Bergholt, to work on pictures for the next exhibition, and to be with his father, who was seriously ailing again. For once there is a hint that, despite saying he was anxious to hear from Maria, he got a strange reassurance from not being near her. Having her at a distance took away ‘the anxious desire … to meet, perhaps too often at least for each other’s comfort ’till we can meet for once, and I trust for good’. It was now he, not she, who advised patience. ‘We have certainly got the worst over – and as we have borne so much and so long, would it not be wiser yet to listen to the voice of prudence?’
He was worried about money, about being able to support her and a family. Her expectations from the rector might help in future, as might his from his father, but he wasn’t ‘quite at liberty on that subject’. And she – while knowing he was right in staying with his father – found at the cold turn of the year that exasperation broke in. Painting seemed to take all his time and attention. ‘How I do dislike pictures,’ she exclaimed three days after Christmas. ‘I cannot bear the sight of them.’ John, on the contrary, loved making pictures but found himself on the last day of the year distressed because he wasn’t able to paint. His father was once again in a ‘very dangerous state’, with all his children within a minute’s call of his bedside. Constable was beginning to wonder whether he would ever have children of his own. William Hurlock, fourth son of the former curate of Langham and ten years younger than Constable, was visiting Dedham with his family and called on the painter, who walked him back to Dedham and met Hurlock’s two lovely boys. Constable wrote enviously and gloomily to Maria about this, and it made her gloomy too. Meanwhile, Mr Travis continued to ease Golding Constable ‘down the hill of life’, bringing two bottles of medicine on each visit. On one such call Mr Constable was alert enough to ask, ‘Why two bottles?’ Travis replied, ‘One is to do you good, one to do me good.’
Bergholt was ‘quite in a bustle’, with the Common being enclosed and the resulting fields being reapportioned. Constable wrote to Maria, ‘Some amongst us have shown such extreme greediness and rapacity to “lay feild to feild” as to make themselves obnoxious.’ Some did well out of the enclosure, others did poorly; any immediate cash gain may have seemed acceptable but long-held grazing and growing rights were lost. During the long war with France arable land had greatly increased in value. The price of wheat had soared in a generation, from 45 shillings a quarter in 1789 to 102 shillings in 1814.2 Landowners were correspondingly wealthier. Drawings and oil sketches which Constable had done of the Common were eventually put to use in one of a series of landscape engravings of his work; now he gave his tiny bit of allotted land near the Constable windmill to his brother Golding. He managed to get away for a weekend in London at the end of January when he saw Maria. On his return to Suffolk he had some books sent to her, one being a ‘beautifully written’ life of Claude Lorrain. He was also on the lookout for a spaniel for her to take the place of Frisk.
On the occasion of this London visit, Maria had apparently discussed the vexed question of her dearest’s friendship with John Dunthorne. She regarded the plumber/glazier/artist as an unfitting companion for John Constable. He was ‘destitute of religious principle’ – a verdict that may have reflected what her grandfather said about Dunthorne – and was in every way his inferior. This put Constable on the spot. He struggled with what to do. Old friend on one side, dearly beloved young woman on the other. At last he decided that as Dunthorne was ‘determined to continue in his perverse and evil ways’, he would get Mr Travis to tell him not to come to the Constable house again, except on business (po
ssibly, as a close-at-hand plumber, Dunthorne could not be spared); their neighbourly and artistic relations were at an end. According to Constable, Dunthorne at this point was as upset with him as he with Dunthorne. ‘The sight of me became a monster to him, and he wished to be rid of me.’
One wonders how much this imbroglio was kindled by Constable’s desire to appease the rector. The episode leaves a sour taste, and didn’t in any event affect the state of things for the lovers. Dr Rhudde was again ‘entirely inveterate’ against Constable as a potential husband for Maria, and equally against was his daughter (and Maria’s aunt) Mrs Harriet Farnham. Banishing Dunthorne into outer darkness didn’t help. The rector’s attitude was further reinforced by a completely tactless act by Constable. He had learned from Maria that the Bicknells were looking for a new school for her fourteen-year-old sister Catherine. Miss Taylor’s school in East Bergholt was suggested as a possibility. Constable heard Miss Taylor saying she hadn’t got enough pupils and thereupon mentioned Catherine to her. He obviously thought Miss Taylor wouldn’t use his name; any sensible person should have known that the recommendation of John Constable would not be the way to Dr Rhudde’s heart. But Miss Taylor wasn’t sensible. The chance of a new pupil was all that mattered. She went at once to the rectory and canvassed the subject of Catherine joining her school. Dr Rhudde erupted. What had John Constable got to do with his family’s private affairs? With his granddaughter’s schooling? Surely Constable was still banned from visiting Spring Gardens? Dr Rhudde wrote a fierce letter to his son-in-law Charles Bicknell, and Maria had to tell Constable not to come to town just yet. His recent visits to the Bicknell house had been kept a secret from the rector, who was now fully apprised and furious about it. ‘How it will end,’ sighed Maria, ‘God only knows.’
Resolution was approaching faster than she knew. When Constable heard from Maria that ‘the kind Doctor says he “considers me no longer as his grand daughter” ’, it was all he needed; his nerve stiffened. He and Maria had done nothing blameable. ‘Our business is now more than ever (if possible) with ourselves.’ Moreover, he had been talking with his brothers and sisters about William Mason’s proposals for their father’s estate and doing his arithmetic, all the while Mr Constable inexorably declined. ‘I shall inherit a sixth part of my father’s property, which we expect may be at least four thousand pounds apeice, and Mrs Smith [his aunt in Nayland] will leave about two thousand pounds more amongst us – and I am entirely free of debt. I trust [-] could I be made happy [-] to make a good deal more than I do now of my profession.’ After this, ‘my dearest Maria’, he had nothing more to say, other than ‘The sooner we are married the better’. No more arguments! ‘We have been great fools not to have married long ago[,] by which we might perhaps have stopped the mouths of all our enemies.’ He didn’t mind who read this, including her father.
Constable had now stayed in East Bergholt longer than for many years and he remained another month, despite the need to get his pictures to the Academy and despite hearing from Maria that she had been ill. She had visited Greenwich, ‘a damp, unhealthy place’, and caught a cold. On 9 March she excused herself to him for not writing a long letter, ‘for thinking hurts my chest’, and then added lightly, ‘I really think it does me good to be ill for a day or two, one enjoys so much the more returning to one’s usual occupations, and the charm of breathing the fresh air.’ Chest – breath – air. Intimations. She in fact seemed a trifle rattled in late March, complaining when he wrote to her too often and when he wrote too little (a contrariness Constable pointed out to her).
The pictures he took to town at the end of March for the Academy exhibition were A Wheat Field and A Wood, Autumn. The wheatfield was part of his customary territory, land on the slopes below Bergholt with the Stour valley leading up to Stratford St Mary, with what looks like the remains of the ‘runover dungle’ in a far corner of the field and a closer than usual view of people harvesting: five men working around the walled edges of the wheat; a boy carrying an armful of wheat up the slope; a woman and two girls gleaning; and a boy with a dog sitting beside a pile of clothes and baskets, no doubt containing food and drink; above, a serene summer sky. Despite the human interest, it is a less focused picture than the Stour Valley and Dedham Village painting of a year before. As for A Wood, it is now lost to sight but was bought immediately by Constable’s uncle, David Pike Watts, for forty guineas; it may have illustrated Constable’s former haunts in Helmingham Park.3 Although he exhibited only two paintings at Somerset House, this year was to be his most productive ever. Among other pictures he had worked on were a long-promised copy of a Reynolds portrait for Lady Louisa Manners – a good patron who, however, kept interrupting his landscape work when he was in London and gave him added reason for staying in Bergholt as long as possible. Press reaction to his Academy exhibits was not wholehearted. Ackermann’s Repository of Art said, ‘From extreme carelessness this artist has gone to the other extreme, and now displays the most laboured finish.’ The Examiner’s critic thought differently, approving Constable’s eye for nature but believing ‘his execution is still crude’.4
Golding Constable was given a private view of the Wheat Field before his son took the paintings to town. The older man was failing: his dropsy had increased and Mr Travis was powerless to help. For several months Constable was a shuttlecock. At the end of February he made a trip to London on art business and to see his ‘beloved and ever dearest’ Maria, then returned to Suffolk to be with his father and was joined by his sister Martha Whalley who came to Bergholt to cheer up the family. At the end of March he returned to town, where, according to Maria, there was much sickness and ‘horrid black, cold, raw, easterly winds’. But in early May he was called again to Suffolk by Abram, to the bedside of their father who said he was ready ‘to be released’. The brief visit of his artist son pleased the old man. Constable was back in Charlotte Street when on 14 May his father died. He wrote to Maria when he got to East Bergholt on 19 May, the day before the funeral, to say:
My dear Father’s end was so happy – he died whilst sitting in his chair as usual, without a sigh or a pang, and without the smallest alteration of his position or features, except a gentle inclination of his head forwards – and my sister Ann who was near had to put her face close to his to assure herself that he breathed no more. Thus it has pleased God to take … this good man to Himself – the rectitude of his conduct through life had disarmed the grave of its terrors, and it pleased God to spare him the pang of death.
Constable now had few doubts as to what his course of action must be. His father’s death left him an equal share with his brothers and sisters in the Constable estate. Abram would continue to run the family business and would hand out to his siblings equal parts of the annual profits; John Constable reckoned he would be getting roughly two hundred a year from this, twice the allowance he had been receiving from his father. Moreover, he could expect a share in what East Bergholt House fetched when sold, there were other well-to-do relatives who might leave him something, and his paintings were starting to bring in regular money. He and Maria might count on at least four hundred a year and that, with careful housekeeping, should be enough. His expectations from David Pike Watts were greater in the eyes of some beholders than in Constable’s, which was as well, for when Uncle David died at the end of July, aged sixty-two, the bulk of his fortune of nearly £300,000 went to his daughter.5 Dr Rhudde was said to be ‘full of indignity’ about this, partly because he had decided that Mr Watts had been a greater monetary benefactor to Constable over the years than was in fact the case. In mid-August, reporting from East Bergholt this sub-plot to Maria in Putney, Constable added wryly that, still, ‘the Doctor is quite well & may live to see things in their right light yet’.
It appeared that Dr Rhudde’s reactions had ceased to matter as much as before. Another factor that had impelled Constable was the wedding of his friend John Fisher, a ceremony conducted on 2 July by Fisher’s uncle the Bishop of Salisbury.
Constable saw Farington that day, told him of Fisher’s marriage, and said that ‘under all the circumstances He had made up his mind to marry Miss Bicknell without further delay & to take the chance of what might arise’.6 With his heels dug in, Constable was not about to put up with any further harasssment from Maria’s father. He had been visiting Spring Gardens fairly frequently and on one such occasion was seen by Mr Bicknell holding hands with Maria. Mr Bicknell said, ‘Sir, if you were the most approved of lovers, you could not take a greater liberty with my daughter.’ Constable replied, ‘And don’t you know, Sir, that I am the most approved of lovers?’7
Though unapproved by Mr Bicknell, Constable with his mind made up was ‘happy in love’. Close at hand in East Bergholt he kept a portrait he had done of Maria, which was the first thing he saw in the morning and the last at night; he said it calmed his spirits. He sent Maria a book of the letters of Saloman Gessner, the Swiss poet and painter, whose essay on landscape had been given him by J.T. Smith nineteen years before and provided early encouragement. And he gave her a new dog, Dash, from his sister Ann’s kennels in East Bergholt. His instructions to Maria were that Dash should be fed ‘bread or a little barley meal well scalded with extream boiling water, and a bit of fat mixed with it’, and he should have very little meat. This made for a healthy dog. (Dash turned out to be not fond of barley meal, though he choked it down.) Constable’s bad news from Bergholt in mid-August was the weather, with the hay and corn a month late. Mount Tambora, a volcano in Indonesia, had erupted the previous year and its spreading ash clouds made 1816 in Europe ‘the year without a summer’.
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