Hampstead was the perfect place for this activity. It was at a height, slight but meaningful, over London. It provided expansive prospects from a continuous elevation and little interference from dramatic scenery nearby. Here he could keep what was almost a visual journal, in Fisher’s words like Gilbert White ‘narrowly observing and noting down all the natural occurrences that came within his view’. Exactly what other meteorological scholarship of the time became part of his thinking is uncertain, but Luke Howard’s early essays and his Climate of London (1818–20), classifying different types of cloud, are in evidence. Howard named the clouds in a way which stuck; his Latinate term ‘cirrus’ has been made out by some experts on the back of one of Constable’s 1822 studies. Moreover, Constable wrote Howard’s name in notes he made while reading Thomas Forster’s Researches about Atmospheric Phaenomena, first published in 1813. Constable’s second-edition copy cost him six shillings. Its first chapter concerned the theories Howard expressed in his essays, and Constable’s annotations to it suggested his disagreement with many of Forster’s conclusions; one such note also uses Howard’s term ‘cumulostrati’. Later Constable wrote to a friend: ‘Forster’s is the best book – he is far from right, still he has the merit of breaking much ground.’ One quotation from Howard in Forster’s book drew attention to Robert Bloomfield’s poem of 1800, The Farmer’s Boy, a poem Constable later copied a long section from.5
Constable obviously didn’t intend to exhibit his cloud studies. They seem to be closely observed expressions of wonder at the beauty and variety of creation. He may also have thought they would be items in his armoury – material that he could employ when he needed ‘a sky’ for an exhibition painting. Yet he wasn’t totally successful in carrying over his spontaneous observations of skies into his finished pictures. Although in The Lock viewers can almost hear the air moving and the trees shaking, and in some paintings of Salisbury cathedral the tip of the spire – slicing the dark clouds that offended Bishop Fisher – seems to vibrate as the wind whistles around it, this wasn’t always the case. In The Hay Wain, the sky isn’t particularly inspired. We may of course think this because we have seen the picture too often, but Constable seems to have shared these doubts; he continued to work on the painting’s sky, after he got it back from the Academy, and, as if aware that he needed to do more aloft, embarked on his skying season in Hampstead at the same time.6
Constable copied a section from Robert Bloomfield’s poem, The Farmer’s Boy, to accompany his cloud study
In most of Constable’s pictures of this period the dynamic conditions are brilliantly suggested. In 1821 he made several pencil sketches of East Bergholt heath that provided material for an oil sketch on a wooden panel: windmill facing into the wind; racing low clouds; rooks wheeling; a ploughman firmly steering the plough pulled by a pair of heavy horses, locked to the spinning earth by gravity. And this eventually formed the basis for one of a series of mezzotint engravings of Constable’s works that he entitled ‘English Landscape’. For the plate called ‘Spring’ Constable wrote that it:
may perhaps give some idea of those bright and animated days of the early year … when at noon large garish clouds, surcharged with hail or sleet, sweep with their broad cool shadows the fields, woods, and hills; and by the contrast of their depths and bloom enhance the value of the vivid greens and yellows, so peculiar to this season … The natural history … of the skies … is this: the clouds accumulate in very large and dense masses, and from their loftiness seem to move but slowly; immediately upon these large clouds appear numerous opaque patches, which, however, are only small clouds passing rapidly before them … These floating much nearer the earth, may perhaps fall in with a stronger current of wind, which as well as their comparative lightness, causes them to move with greater rapidity; hence they are called by wind-millers and sailors ‘messengers,’ and always portend bad weather …
These clouds, wrote Constable, float midway in ‘the lanes of the clouds’ and are almost uniformly in shadow, receiving reflected light only from the clear blue sky above.
In several Hampstead pictures figures are to be seen walking along the ridge lines and near horizons, silhouetted against (and emphasising) the skies. Constable named some of the panoramic views from the Hampstead heights in a letter to Fisher of 3 November 1821, helping him with a circular diagram that showed the compass points. Hampstead was in the centre, St Alban’s to the north, Gravesend to the east, Dorking to the south, and Windsor to the west. He also drew Fisher’s attention to the presence of ‘the finest foregrounds – in roads, heath, trees, ponds &c’. The altitude had got to him. He told Fisher that he had been reading a life of Nicolas Poussin (by Maria Graham). Poussin, obviously an artist after his own heart, proved ‘how much dignity & elevation of character was the result of such patient, persevering and rational study – no circumstances however impropitious could turn him to the right or left – because he knew what he was about – & he felt himself above every scene in which he was placed’. One of the most striking Hampstead paintings was an oil sketch on paper (at some point affixed to canvas) called The Road to the Spaniards, taken from a dip in the road across the Heath leading to the Spaniards Inn, with some trees on the left amid which stood the house of the lawyer Anthony Spedding. It is a view seemingly from below ground level looking up to the top of the sandy track, with agitated thundery clouds tumbling above a few isolated people and animals. The horizon curves – there is a sense of the earth being round indeed. On the back a note records the atmospheric conditions of the day: ‘Monday 29 July 1822, looking NE, three hours after noon … a stormy squall coming from the north-west.’
A resident in Hampstead a few years before had been John Keats. Keats and Constable just missed each other, but they had much in common. Keats wrote to his brothers George and Thomas from Hampstead at the end of 1817, ‘The excellence of every Art is its intensity.’ And in a letter to Benjamin Haydon in April 1818, telling of his plans for a ‘pedestrian tour’ of the north of Britain, Keats exclaimed, ‘I will clamber through the Clouds and exist.’ Constable, clambering also above every scene in the locality, found a new province of his own kingdom on the Heath as he looked up at the clouds soaring past, dawdling, or stuck almost still. He strolled every day to Prospect Walk – now called Judges Walk – to try to capture the atmosphere re-making itself. On 3 September 1821 he painted ‘with large drops of rain falling on my palette’. On 10 September there was thunder and a heavy downpour. On the 11th, a brighter day, the small cumulus clouds were touched with sunlight. He painted the clouds at all sorts of angles, sometimes climbing, sometimes right overhead, sometimes parading directly at him in line ahead. Most of these sketches were oil on paper, and he sometimes made two a day.7 He wrote to Fisher a year or so after, taking his own obsession lightly, discussing having children, and punning on the similarity between nubile (meaning marriageable) and nubilous (by which he seems to have meant shady or cloudy, from Latin nubes, a cloud), he told the archdeacon: ‘You can never be nubilous – I am the man of clouds.’
10. At the Summit of Earthly Ambitions (1822–23)
‘I AM ABOUT Farrington’s [sic] house,’ Constable wrote to Fisher in April 1822. ‘Ruysdael House’ in Keppel Street had been wonderful – ‘the 5 happiest & most interesting years of my life were passed in Keppel Street’, he said later. ‘I got my children and my fame in that house, neither of which would I exchange with any other man.’ But the house was now too small for his family. They were, he said, ‘like bottled wasps upon a southern wall’. Farington’s – 35 Charlotte Street – was both well known to him and more spacious. It had been empty since Farington’s death at the end of the previous year, and after going with Maria to look over it, Constable wrote to Samuel Lane that the house ‘left a deep impression on us both. I can scarcely believe that I was not to meet the elegant and dignified figure of our departed friend … or hear again the wisdom that always attended his advice, which I do indeed miss greatly.’1 After some har
d bargaining with Mr Prior, who held the head lease, he took the house and some of the fixtures, fittings and furniture, including two small Richard Wilson paintings which he had copied at Farington’s behest on his first arrival in London twenty-three years before.
Charlotte Street, named after George III’s wife, had a church, Sass’s School of Art, John Henderson the dentist, William Manning the apothecary, and various architects and artists (including R.R. Reinagle). Number 35 was a typical Fitzrovia terraced house, about thirty years old, standing on the east side of the street, three windows wide and four storeys high above a basement. It also had a one-storey studio at the back, joined to the main house by a small gallery with a barrel-vaulted skylight. Constable had moved in by mid-June, having got an again heavily pregnant Maria and the three children and Mrs Roberts into summer quarters at Hampstead – once more at 2 Lower Terrace. The move was expensive, and Constable scurried for cash, politely dunning Mary Watts-Russell for money she owed him and taking on several commissions. The Manningtree altarpiece of Christ rising from the grave was one; others were a large picture for the son of his late uncle by marriage, Christopher Savile, and a Salisbury Cathedral for Bishop Fisher.2
Moreover, the house involved unexpected outlays. Although the painting room itself seemed ‘light, airy, sweet & warm’, bricklayers, carpenters and plumbers had to sort out serious sanitation problems; a hollow wall that connected with the studio floor turned out to be – Constable told Fisher – ‘immediately over the well of the privy. This would have played the devil with the oxygen of my colours’. And detracted from the supposed sweetness. There were also unsuspected neighbour problems. The Priors and the Blatches, on each side of 35, were friendly and soon got used to incursions by the Constable cats, but two women across the street were running a brothel. In early September Lucy Dale and Elizabeth Williams were charged at Clerkenwell Sessions with keeping a common bawdy house, and Constable was the principal witness against them. The case dragged on for several months. Then Lucy Dale confessed her guilt and was bound over to keep the peace for two years; Elizabeth Williams was discharged. Constable had to appear in court on several days and didn’t get off unscathed since he agreed to pay all the costs, about thirty pounds. On 6 December he told Fisher that ‘the inmates have long since fled, some of whom were the old womans daughters – & we hope the business is well done’. Anything for a quiet life.
Fisher wrote to console Constable in February 1822 when, bested by Cook and Daniell, he failed again to be elected a full member of the Academy. ‘The title of RA will never weigh a straw in that balance in which you are ambitious to be found heavy, namely the judgement of posterity. You are painting for a name to be remembered hereafter: for the time when men shall talk of Wilson & Vanderneer & Ruisdale & Constable in the same breath.’ Constable thought ‘the disgrace was not mine’, and was so busy he soon forgot his failure; he sent five paintings to the annual exhibition, among them Malvern Hall and The Bridge, his large picture of the year – his fourth six-footer; on no painting, he said, had he ever worked so hard. He had trouble composing the picture, telling Fisher that since the archdeacon had seen the painting ‘I have taken away the sail, and added another barge in the middle of the picture, with a principal figure, altered the group of trees, and made the bridge entire. The picture now has a rich centre …’ In the event, the scene now seems a touch too picturesque, and the activity about the barges melodramatic, though his sometimes hard-to-please sister Ann thought the painting ‘beautiful’. It was renamed for the exhibition View on the Stour, near Dedham, and pleased many of the critics. Robert Hunt of The Examiner found in it, ‘among the glare of gold frames, … the consoling recollection of the charms of nature’.3 Constable thought his reputation was rising as a landscape painter. He wrote to Fisher, ‘I am (as Farrington always said I should be) fast becoming a distinct feature in that way.’ But Constable’s naturalism wasn’t always popular with his gold-framed colleagues.
In April he had made a brief visit to Suffolk and saw for himself the countrywide agricultural distress that prevented John Fisher buying The Hay Wain. Abram was uncomfortable about the state of things. Constable reported to Fisher that his brother thought the situation as bad as in Ireland – ‘ “never a night without seeing fires near or at a distance”, The Rector & his brother the Squire (Rowley & Godfrey) have forsaken the village – no abatement of tithes or rents – four of Sir Wm. Rush’s tenants distrained next parish – these things are ill-timed’. Constable’s sympathy for the working peasantry seems to have been exceeded by his disdain for the local gentry. However, he was upset on his sister Ann’s behalf that her house had been broken into while she was at church; she lost some spoons, a box Dr Rhudde had given her, and a watch which had been their father’s.
Money was tight all round that summer and Constable might have been expected to welcome several generous gestures from clients. Fisher’s friend Tinney, the lawyer, offered one hundred guineas for a companion picture to Stratford Mill, the Constable Fisher had given him. Constable didn’t take this up. But he couldn’t say no to the Bishop of Salisbury, who sent a banker’s draft to alleviate Constable’s financial troubles, adding ‘Lawyers frequently receive retaining fees, why should not painters do the same?’ This advance payment may have been a way of making up for Constable’s kind tutoring of his daughter Dorothea and a means of nudging along his new painting Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s Grounds, which the Bishop hoped would soon ‘be ready to grace my Drawing Room in London’. Constable’s other big job of the moment was the altarpiece for Manningtree. This had come about, he first believed, as ‘a gift of compunction … from a gentleman who is supposed to have defrauded his family’. Then Constable learned that his patron, Edward Alston, a brewer and distant relative of his, had in fact commissioned the picture in order to placate the Archdeacon of Colchester, who was in charge of licensing public houses in Manningtree. When the archdeacon died, Alston considered abandoning the project. But in the end Alston’s offer of £200 to the parish of Manningtree was made good, and Constable – who had already invested £5 in a large mahogany frame for the piece – got on with the painting. The Risen Christ offers no rebuttal to the view that Constable should have stayed away from religious subjects: his red-bearded, bare-chested Christ rises with outstretched arms from the dark earth into a golden swirl of clouds, grave-clothes tied around his waist like a sarong, his expression suggestive of anxiety to know how he had got here. His hands show the wounds from being nailed to the cross and a disciple cowers at his feet. Benjamin West seems again to have provided some religiose precedents.fn14
Another summer, another child: Isabel, John and Maria Constable’s fourth child and second daughter, was born on 23 August 1822 at 2 Lower Terrace. Mary Constable sent to Hampstead from Flatford Mill a chicken and a cake. Constable had meant to visit Fisher in Salisbury soon afterwards – new babies needed Maria, not him – but he was still in Hampstead in early October and Fisher was moving back to Osmington. Constable wrote to his friend that he now had to shift his own family to Charlotte Street. ‘I have got an excellent subject for a six foot canvas … but I have neither time nor money to speculate with, & my children begin to swarm.’ What seemed to be a case of male post-partum depression left him gloomy about the new RA Associates – ‘not an artist among them’ – and the state of English painting – ‘The art will go out – there will be no genuine painting in England in 30 years.’ He thought the work of younger artists was influenced for the worse by the British Institution, whose directors favoured imitation old masters. And he wasn’t happy about the proposed new National Gallery – more old masters. On 6 December he wrote to Fisher, with his usual mixture of shyness and bravado, that his chance of being elected a full member of the Academy was less than it had been a year before. ‘I have nothing to help me but my stark naked merit, and although that (as I am told) exceeds all the other candidates – it is not heavy enough. I have no patron but yourself – and you are
not the Duke of Devonshire – or any other great ass. You are only a gentleman & a scholar and a real lover of the art …’ In his black mood he forgot about the Dysart family, Bishop Fisher, Tinney, General Rebow and other supporters.
Constable’s worries may have sprung partly from having The Hay Wain and The Bridge still on his hands, partly from ill health, and partly from fears (a trifle exaggerated) of financial ruin: ‘I shall want at least 400£ at Xmas.’ Running two houses and supporting his wife and four children (with nurses, cook and housekeeper) made him on edge, or deeply despondent. He told Fisher that ‘anxiety – watching – & nursing – & my own present indisposition’ kept him from his easel through January 1823. Dr Matthew Baillie of Cavendish Square, one of George III’s physicians, had joined Dr Gooch in looking after the Constables, though both doctors generally refused payment. (Gooch was given a painting, Baillie a print, for their services.) A particular concern was John Charles, now five years old and ‘in a bad state’. Constable himself was emaciated and weak from bloodletting, while Maria ended the winter ‘extremely delicate’ and needing much care. Two of the servants were laid up. And Constable was dismally right about his Academy chances: despite the vacancy being for Joseph Farington’s seat, his old mentor’s influence was sorely lacking; he did less well than before and his former friend Richard Ramsay Reinagle was elected – ‘the most weak and undesirable artist on the list’, Constable thought. Reinagle later claimed (in a letter of 1850 to the Literary Gazette) to have helped Constable, whom he called ‘a pupil of mine’, by painting some cattle in a Constable landscape. When Reinagle made this assertion, it was after being forced to resign his Academy membership for exhibiting as his own somebody else’s picture.5
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