John Fisher, 1817
Another picture was formed in embryo at this time. In late June Constable walked over the new Waterloo Bridge shortly after it had been opened and named by the Prince Regent. He had been going daily to Somerset House for the exhibition and apparently saw the opening ceremony from its terrace. Taken by the radiance of the sun on the water and the red and gold standards of the royal barges, he seems to have decided then and there that this was the subject for a painting. He made sketches and then continued to work away at the subject on and off: in July 1819 he wrote to Fisher, ‘I have made a sketch of my scene on the Thames – which is very promising.’ Various paintings featuring the bridge followed in the next thirteen years, some bowing to Canaletto, others to Turner, who – as will be seen – became extremely competitive about the high-key of Constable’s eventual painting, which threatened Turner’s status as the reputed doyen of ‘white painters’.
In early August Constable and Maria – more than four months pregnant – forsook London for the country. They stayed for nearly three months, for the most part in East Bergholt, presumably with Abram, Ann and Mary in the old family house (which there was now talk of selling), and Maria blossomed. Dr Rhudde was quiet, though there were fears he might be biding his time before exploding. Out of doors and in, Constable worked hard, building up a stock of useful drawings and oil sketches, using both a four-and-a-half-inch by seven-and-a-quarter-inch sketchbook and larger loose sheets. His territory extended to Dedham, Ipswich and Mistley; they visited the Rebows in Wivenhoe and in Feering called on the Reverend Driffield, who was keen to know how things stood with the Doctor. Constable walked, as always, down Fen Lane, and on 25 July he sketched the entrance to the lane. This seems to have been the occasion of the unfinished picture (now in Tate Britain); he perhaps meant to finish it in town. The viewer is attracted down the lane along the shadowed side of a hedge, the rutted lane itself in sun as it curves downhill through trees. Beyond are the valley and Dedham church tower. In the sunlit field on the left, over the hedge, are seen the heads and white shirts of a gang of mowers and reapers at work in the wheat. Sam Strowger had applauded the correctness of Constable’s vision in such a picture, pointing out to the agriculturally ignorant members of the arranging committee how the appointed leader or ‘lord’ of the gang moved ahead of the rest – as he was doing here. This practice prevailed in many parts of the English countryside. In north Oxfordshire, the ‘lord’ was called ‘king of the mowers’ and was generally the tallest and most experienced man, according to Flora Thompson. ‘With a wreath of poppies and green bindweed trails around his wide, rush-plaited hat, he led the band down the swathes as they mowed and decreed when and for how long they should halt for “a breather”.’ A stone jar to drink from was kept under a hedge in the shade.6 On the back of another open-air oil sketch Constable painted at East Bergholt this year, the artist wrote, ‘Made this sketch, Oct.1817. Old Joseph King, my father’s huntsman, came to me at this time – there was a barn on the right in which he had thrashed that time 70 years.’7
Elms in Old Hall Park, East Bergholt
When Constable and Maria returned to town in late October, he showed his Suffolk studies to Farington and others; W.R. Bigg liked them, and Constable was judged to have had a successful campaign. His star was at last rising. Rumours were heard that he would become an Associate at the next RA elections. Sir William Beechey, the portrait painter, told David Pike Watts’s daughter Mary Watts-Russell that her cousin was ‘a general favourite’ and would have ‘plenty of votes’. Constable made light of this, explaining to Maria that ‘poor, good-natured Beechey’ must have said the same of twenty candidates. When the elections took place, on the evening of 3 November, five out of the twenty-four members voted for Constable in the first poll, which was won by the sculptor E.H. Baily, and in the second he got eight votes in the contest won by the animal and battle-scene painter Abraham Cooper. But Constable was cheered; this was better than he had ever done before. And Farington, although no longer an across-the-street neighbour, went on being a confidant: he and Constable talked in December about Haydon and ‘his continued abuse of the Academy’.8 Constable, albeit married, was still invited to dinner at Farington’s, as on the occasion in March 1818 when other guests were Henry Thomson RA, Samuel Lane and the American Gilbert Stuart Newton.
The big event of the winter, three weeks before Christmas, was the safe arrival in Keppel Street of John Charles Constable – ‘a fine boy’, according to Farington. The infant was delivered on 4 December 1817 at 9 a.m., so Constable later recorded in the family Bible. East Bergholt was quickly informed and from there the news went out to the aunt at Nayland. Ann Constable also wrote to pass on the important fact that the intelligence had reached the rectory. Mr Travis had called there and Dr Rhudde had asked him, ‘What news?’ Travis replied, ‘You are a great grandfather, Doctor,’ at which Dr Rhudde didn’t seem at all displeased. He said, ‘You must now approach me with additional respect, as I am a Patriarch.’ The Doctor then told Mr Travis that he intended to leave it something in his will.
Ann Constable immediately began to look among the local girls for a nursemaid. But Constable himself, according to Charles Leslie, proved to be an exceptionally attentive father. John Charles ‘might be seen almost as often in his arms as in those of his nurse, or even his mother. His fondness for children exceeded … that of any man I ever knew.’ The baby was christened on 19 March, the godparents being Maria’s father, the Bicknells’ friend Charles Phillips of Pall Mall, and Mary Watts-Russell of Portland Place.
Whether being a father had anything to do with it is uncertain, but in 1818 Constable began to think of pictures on a bigger scale – a scale which might finally get him the recognition he felt he deserved. Family letters are sparse for this period. He was absorbed with Maria, the baby and painting. However, the pictures he showed at Somerset House that year were still mostly small-scale: two drawings and four landscapes in oil, one of which may have been a view of Dedham Lock and Mill he painted several times; a wonderfully fresh version of this shows a cloudy sky beginning to clear after a shower and the red-brick mill reflected in the water below lock gates. Several reviewers talked of his extraordinary pencilling and peculiar felicity. The critic of the Morning Herald thought Landscape – breaking up of a shower displayed ‘much genius’. The Literary Gazette called it ‘a remarkably sweet production’ which had ‘something … of the glittering freshness … of summer rain’.9 Constable was preoccupied to the point where he forgot to put his name down as a candidate for the November elections, but an official of the Academy assumed he had meant to and did so for him. He shared the good news with Farington that he had sold two landscapes, one for forty-five, another for twenty guineas; it was better, he agreed, for them to be seen and sold at moderate prices than held on to unsold.10 It was also a busy year for portraits. He finished one of Mrs Pulham, the Woodbridge solicitor’s wife, and others of Dr John Wingfield (headmaster of Westminster School), Dr William Walker (rector of Layham, a few miles from East Bergholt), the Reverend Dr James Andrew (a governor of Addiscombe College, in Kent) and his wife; and he started a new portrait of Dr Fisher, the Bishop of Salisbury, to whose daughter Dorothea he also gave painting lessons. Portraits brought in ready money in small but useful amounts, and because Constable’s fees were modest, he was in demand. Portraits kept him so busy during the summer that there was only time for short trips to Suffolk between his imperative visits to see Maria and John Charles in Putney. East Bergholt House was being put on the market and family discussions involved him in prices, disposal of furniture, and new places to live for his brothers and sisters. He was in the village briefly in late October when he managed to spend some time in the churchyard sketching his parents’ tomb and to make his last drawing of the house from the fields at the back.
Dedham mill and lock
The year’s Academy elections for Associates went normally. Despite the hopes raised earlier, and despite some ca
nvassing he did in June, Constable – still regarded as only a landscape painter – performed poorly. His friend Samuel Lane, a portrait painter of middling talent, was regarded as having stronger chances in the run-up to the contest in November. In the end Constable got one vote – less than he had done the year before – and the single vacancy went to the American Washington Allston, who was at sea, en route to Boston. One election Constable won was for a directorship of the Artists’ General Benevolent Institution; Turner was in the chair at the May meeting where this occurred.11 Clearly this was a body that didn’t hold Constable’s supposed cushion of income against him, and rightly so. He was always a giver: alike to poor musicians, impoverished painters, in-need farm workers, elderly hard-up East Bergholt folk, and young women selling flowers in London streets.
The family house was sold in early November. The buyers were a neighbouring couple, Mr and Mrs Walter Clerk, and forty-five years’ worth of possessions had to be cleared out. Constable wasn’t able to make a visit and Abram bore the brunt of the work. Their sister Ann set about getting an old cottage on the heath repaired for herself, with Golding as a rather uncomfortable companion for a time. He was away during the house transaction, unwell, probably with epilepsy – Abram a few years later noted that Golding sometimes had fits which made him momentarily senseless and left his mind ‘very weak’. But Golding returned to East Bergholt in August 1819 and was able to resume his favourite sport, shooting game; he stayed until he went to a house on the Dysarts’ estate at Helmingham as live-in land warden. Mary joined Abram at the old house attached to Flatford Mill, once again within earshot and touching distance of the river. William Mason, the family solicitor in Colchester, did the conveyancing. The furniture, books, tools and agricultural implements were auctioned over three days in mid-March 1819 in two hundred lots, for good prices. The livestock, wagons and farm carriage were sold on the first day. Abram bought two of the horses for seventy-five guineas and Mary bought her three favourite cows, Cherry, Tibby, and Feresty. Ann reported that the toys were in particular demand: ‘the doll’s bed with tatter’d garniture sold for a guinea, the child’s wagon and sundry other toys 17s. – the windmill &c., 15s.6d.’ John Constable didn’t attend the auction.12
Constable’s brother, Abram, c.1806
Dr Rhudde’s disposition was still a constant concern. Sometimes he seemed affable until the dreaded words ‘John Constable’ were mentioned. Yet in December, around the time of the birth of John Charles, Dr Rhudde drew up a new will in which he left his granddaughter Maria the same share in his estate as her siblings. It was perhaps just in time. The Doctor was seen several times searching the rectory for his late wife, and on one occasion in early March 1819 was discovered by his coachman Thomas at 6.30 a.m. sitting by the kitchen fire before any of the other servants were downstairs. Abram thought he often seemed very lost.
Constable’s sisters, Ann and Mary
Constable was particularly busy in the first few months of 1819. He was at work on a single large picture for the Academy exhibition, the first of what became a sequence of six-footers: a ‘Scene on the River Stour’, soon known as The White Horse. He painted the picture entirely in his Keppel Street studio, not in the open air, but used some earlier sketches from Willy Lott’s house and the river below Flatford Lock, and beforehand made a full-size oil sketch, as became his practice with his biggest paintings. The sketch is a darker picture, with rain threatening; the finished, exhibited work has some clouds but a largely sunny sky, bringing out the whiteness of the horse being ferried by barge around the end of the Spong, an island at this point in the Stour. Farington was asked to look at it and he offered several suggestions that Constable said ‘he would attend to’. Whatever alterations Constable made were, for other viewers of the moment, all to the good; he saw Farington a few days after his visit and was ‘in high spirits from the approbation of his picture’.13
His offering to the British Institution at the start of the year hadn’t been acclaimed. Osmington Shore was described by one critic as ‘a sketch of barren sand without interest’. But now his reversion to his native scenery took the reviewers’ fancy. As well as the horse, the painting shows one of the bargees leaning against a quant pole, the surface of the river barely ruffled, a few cattle standing at the water’s edge. Despite having only one focus of ‘action’, on the barge, the painting was awash with bucolic detail: houses amid the trees; a skiff moored at the river bank in front of a thatched boat shed; posts and reeds; white clouds tethered overhead; on one side the river surface reflective, on the other shadowed.
At the time the full-size oil sketch received attention only from the painter and any callers who saw him at work on it, as he tried to resolve various problems the picture presented. Later it was to become the first example in the series of preliminary paintings, the six-foot oil sketches that many were to think Constable’s ‘supreme achievement’.14 In 1819 the finished picture on show at Somerset House attracted more attention than any he had exhibited hitherto. It wasn’t hung in the best room, some of his supporters complained, but it was – as Leslie observed – ‘too large to remain unnoticed’. There were signs that Constable was coming at last into his kingdom. Robert Hunt, critic of The Examiner, wrote on 27 June 1819 that the artist ‘has none of the poetry of Nature like Mr Turner, but he has more of her portraiture’. The art reviewer of the Literary Chronicle exclaimed, ‘What a grasp of everything beautiful in rural scenery!’ and declared that ‘this young artist’ – now forty-two – was ‘rising very fast in reputation’. Martin Archer Shee, who was to become President of the Royal Academy, later said he thought it the finest of Constable’s works. The painter himself was in high spirits at this upbeat reception; the painting, ‘a placid representation of a serene grey morning’ in summer, was (he thereafter said), ‘one of my happiest efforts on a large scale’.15
Even so, there was no rush of buyers. It took the indispensable John Fisher to set the seal on Constable’s success. He had been made an Archdeacon of Berkshire at the end of 1817 and Prebendary of Salisbury Cathedral in the same period. His obligations included giving sumptuous dinners to the Bishop and resident canons, but he also had numerous perquisites, including lifetime use of Leydenhall, a fine house in the cathedral close, with a garden running down to the River Avon. Fisher wrote in July, enquiring as if for an interested friend about the asking price of Constable’s ‘great picture’. He said, ‘We will call it if you please “Life and the pale Horse”, in contra-distinction to Mr West[’s] painting [which was called Death on the Pale Horse].’ Constable replied that the price was a hundred guineas, not including the frame. Fisher wrote back saying he wanted to purchase it. The opposite of a hard bargainer, Constable – now that he knew who the potential buyer was – wanted to charge less for The White Horse, but Fisher wouldn’t agree. ‘Why am I to give you less for your picture than its price? It must not be.’ It was Constable’s first big sale and gave a great boost to his confidence.16
Maria was well gone in pregnancy again. Suffolk plans had therefore been put aside. But in early May Abram told Constable he was really needed in East Bergholt to settle the house business with the Clerks in William Mason’s presence. Moreover, the rector could not ‘continue long, not many day’s [sic], in all human probability’. Constable took the Ipswich coach but got to the village a few hours too late on 6 May; it would have been his mother’s birthday and the church bell was tolling. He wrote at once to Maria: ‘The poor Doctor breathed his last about 5 o’clock this morning … Mr Travis did not think he suffered much pain though he was so long in dying.’
Two days later the Ipswich Journal printed an obituary of the Doctor:
Thursday last died, in his 86th year, the Rev. Durand Rhudde, D.D., Rector of Brantham with Bergholt, and of Great Wenham, in this county, and Chaplain in Ordinary to His Majesty. He was formerly of King’s College, Cambridge …
In East Bergholt all seemed much quieter without the Doctor and the gossip and coming
s and goings that had attended him. Constable took the chance of being there to go for a contemplative walk up to Langham through the fields and along the river. He wrote to Maria: ‘I never saw Nature more lovely … Every tree seems full of blossom of some kind & the surface of the ground seems quite lovely – every step I take & on whatever object I turn my eye[,] that sublime expression in the Scripture “I am the resurrection & the life” &c., seems verified about me.’ Although the Doctor may have lost some of his wits towards the end, his last will treated Maria fairly. Like the Bicknells’ other three children (Samuel, Catherine and Louisa), she was left £4,000 of government 3 per cent stock. Her father discontinued her allowance of £50 a year, but with the Rhudde legacy giving her £120 a year the Constables were ahead by £70. Constable specified strictly how the executors should make over the money and the government stocks. He said, ‘The hand of Providence has been with us.’
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