John Constable

by Anthony Bailey

  Mouse

  Brighton: a rainstorm over the sea

  It was a relief to take Johnny Dunthorne down to Brighton for a week in early June, and Johnny made himself useful there by preparing Constable’s painting box for him. Constable took it to the beach where he rested it on his knees, the inside of the lid forming a working surface for his oil sketches. He generally used a coarse-wove paper, primed with two or three coats of oil paint – pink, brown or grey. Often his sketch was still wet when he unpinned it and put it away, and traces of paint stuck to the sheet above. A longer Brighton sojourn occurred in the second half of July. Minna’s birthday was on the 19th and he got there two days before. He came meaning to have a month’s working holiday and stayed for nearly three months. Constable found a great deal there for the painter: the beach, the sea, the breakers, the fishing boats and coal brigs, the chain pier, the sky. On Minna’s birthday he went down to the beach, pinned his paper to his box lid, and in oils painted several of the coal-black colliers at the water’s edge, unloading coal. He wrote on the back for John Fisher’s benefit, ‘3d tide receding left the beach wet – Head of the Chain Pier Beach Brighton July 19 Evg., 1824 My dear Maria’s Birthday Your Goddaughter – Very lovely Evening – looking Eastward – cliffs & light off a dark [?] effect – background – very white and golden light.’ The chain pier (builder Captain Brown, Royal Navy) had opened the year before and Constable’s drawings of it provided material for an oil shown at the RA in 1827. (Turner painted the pier a year later.) Later, one of Constable’s beach sketches was engraved and he wrote that it was meant to convey ‘one of those animated days when the masses of cloud, agitated and torn, are passing rapidly’, while the wind ‘meeting with a certain set of tide, causes the sea to rise and swell’.13 He painted a picture of Mrs Sobers’ Western Lodge, with its ‘Gothic’ features. He walked to Worthing and also up on to the Downs on a fine day to see the Dyke, the old Roman embankment, ‘perhaps the most grand & affecting natural landscape in the world – and consequently a scene the most unfit for a picture. It is the business of a painter not to contend with nature & put this scene (a valley filled with imagery 50 miles long) on a canvas of a few inches, but to make something out of nothing …’ One sketch catches superbly this natural – i.e. in Constable’s eyes insufficiently cultivated – landscape, with the roll of the sparsely grassed Downs under low clouds, cattle grazing loosely, and a windmill off to the right in the shadowed foreground. It was curious how Constable could combine the creation of such a moving sketch (made on 3 August 1824) with the spleen he expressed on the back of it: ‘Smock or Tower Mill west end of Brighton – the neighbourhood of Brighton – consists of London cow fields – and Hideous masses of unfledged earth called the country.’14

  In late August he was still in two minds about even being in Brighton. He appreciated what seemed an improvement in Maria’s health beside the sea but clearly wasn’t attuned to all the pleasures of a seaside resort. Fisher received a surly blast at the end of the month:

  I am living here but I dislike the place … Brighton is the receptacle of the fashion and off-scouring of London. The magnificence of the sea, and its (to use your own beautifull expression) everlasting voice, is drowned in the din & lost in the tumult of stage coaches – gigs – ‘flys’ &c. – and the beach is only Piccadilly … by the seaside. Ladies dressed & undressed – gentlemen in morning gowns & slippers on, or without them altogether about knee deep in the breakers – footmen – children – nursery maids, dogs, boys, fishermen – preventive service men (with hangers & pistols), rotten fish & those hideous amphibious animals the old bathing women, whose language both in oaths & voice resembles men – all are mixed together in endless & indecent confusion.

  It was high summer and perhaps the heat, the celebrated ‘dippers’ Martha Gunn and Old Smoaker, and the Piccadilly-like crowds didn’t help his temper. Constable waxed on:

  The genteeler part, the marine parade, is still more unnatural – with its trimmed and neat appearance & the dandy jetty or chain pier, with its long & elegant strides into the sea a full ¼ of a mile. In short there is nothing here for a painter but the breakers – & sky – which have been lovely indeed and always varying.

  While getting that off his chest, Constable shared some of his better news. His wife and children were delightfully well. He had made friends with Henry Phillips, a botanist, who was intelligent. He was also getting on with some of his ‘French jobs’, one of which was apparently a Hampstead view for Charles Schroth.

  Back in London at the beginning of November, soon joined by Maria and the children, he had to deal with another bout of illness and depression. He told Fisher, ‘All my indispositions have their source in my mind – it [is] when I am restless and unhappy that I become susceptible of cold – damp – heats – and such nonsense. I have not been well for many weeks – but I hope soon to rid myself of these things and get to work again.’ Restless and unhappy. Yet the need to work. It was the artist’s life. He was also again having trouble talking Tinney into lending Stratford Mill for the British Institution exhibition in January 1825 or getting Tinney to let him postpone fulfilment of a generous commission of two ‘uprights’. Fortunately there was good news a few weeks later. He reported to Fisher that Johnny Dunthorne was helping him and cheering him up. Moreover, ‘my wife is quite well – never saw her better and more active & cheerfull – but she is rather stouter than I could have wished. My children are lovely – and much grown. John I am sorry to say is a genius … droll & acute … Your goddaughter is so much the little lady that she delights every body.’

  From Paris came further news that he was – in Fisher’s words – ‘the talk and admiration of the French’. W.H. Pyne had written colourfully in the Somerset House Gazette in July that Constable’s three paintings – one being The Hay Wain – might have remained in Charlotte Street ‘till Doomsday, had not a collector from Paris called upon their ingenious author, Mr Constable, and purchased them, in their accumulated dust, as they hung almost obsolete on his walls’. His pictures were first displayed at Arrowsmith’s gallery, where Delacroix came twice to see them and repainted his Massacre at Scio as a result. At the Louvre, on 25 August, they joined an exhibition of works by living French artists. The director-general of royal museums, Comte Auguste de Forbin, was dissatisfied with where the Constables were first hung and moved them to ‘a post of honor … in the principal room’.15 Reporting to Fisher, Constable expressed his pleasure at this and at a comment he was told was overheard in the Louvre: ‘Look at these English pictures – the very dew is upon the ground.’ James Pulham, his old friend and patron in Woodbridge, wrote to say that Constable’s presence in the Louvre ‘must invoke the English Primacy to make you … a Royal Academician’. Mr Pulham thought the purchase of works from such a famous artist must now be beyond him. Constable was moved to give Pulham one of his pictures of Harwich Lighthouse, which he finished on 15 July and Johnny packed up and sent off the next day. The seal was set on Constable’s French success when the King, Charles X, visited the Louvre in January 1825; he made Sir Thomas Lawrence a knight of the Legion of Honour for his portraits, and awarded Constable a gold medal for his landscapes.16

  12. The Leaping Horse (1825–26)

  ON 5 JANUARY, in bleak midwinter, Constable told Fisher that he was ‘writing this hasty scrawl [in the] dark before a six foot canvas – which I have just launched with all my usual anxieties’. This was his sixth six-footer, and he had been planning it for nearly two months. Fisher thought a bit more diversity in Constable’s subject matter and mood would help, but the artist said he wasn’t about to vary his plans ‘to keep the Publick in good humour’. There were to be two pen-and-wash studies and a full-size oil sketch, and despite his confessed anxieties, in his next letter to his friend he said the subject was ‘most promising … It is [a] canal, and full of the bustle incident to such a scene where four or five boats are passing with dogs, horses, boys, & men & women & children, and best of all old t
imber-props, water plants, willow stumps, sedges, old nets, &c&c&c.’ But it didn’t come easy. He was distracted by some portrait work: a group picture of the Lambert family of Woodmansterne, near Croydon, friends of the Bicknells. Then he didn’t have a great deal of stuff in his store for this particular spot on the Stour, the so-called canal, and depended much on memories of the towpath along which he had walked to school in Dedham.1

  The scene was at the Float Jump, where a low wooden barrier across the towpath kept cattle from getting by and the horses, which towed the barges, could be jumped over it. The artist looked from the south, on the land side of the river bank and a sluice which connected a field to the river; Flatford was well downstream to the right. A barge was being poled across the river to collect its horse. The first study shows a horse standing at the barrier. The second shows a riderless horse vaulting the Jump. The large oil sketch shows a youthful rider hanging on tight as the horse leaps over the Jump like a hunter or cavalry charger. Between the oil sketch and the exhibited painting there were further changes: a barge whose prow had just entered the picture in the sketch has passed by downstream; the first barge has sprouted a mast, with a sail ready for hoisting. The lad riding the horse is dressed distinctly in waistcoat and hat. A bent and pollarded willow on the near bank has been slightly straightened and moved from in front of the horse to behind it, removing the sense that it is getting in the way of the leap. Dedham church is at the right-hand edge of the painting, though it wouldn’t have been visible from this angle. In all the pictures – studies, full-size sketch and finished piece – there is an excitement that mounts. In the first study it is evident in the vigorous pen work. In the second it is made clear in the turmoil of clouds and the upward thrust of the horse. Most suggestive of movement is the big oil sketch, with its cloud-dark, windy sky. But on this occasion one can approve the finished painting most (it isn’t too finished). The jumble of matter on the river bank in the foreground – old timbers, the little bridge carrying the towpath over the sluice-gate, an eel trap, a net, a moorhen flapping frightened from its nest, various plants and weeds – were all detailed in a letter he wrote to a possible buyer later in the year. The startled moorhen, based on a separate sketch, was a late addition. As he drove the paint on to the canvas, he gave the impression that more senses were involved than just his sight: he could hear the Stour water splashing through the sluice and the wind stirring the willows; he could smell the mud and slime on the banks.2 Nevertheless, he wasn’t satisfied with it. It was a rush to get it to Somerset House; the painting should have stayed in his painting room several weeks longer; and after it had been sent in he wrote to Fisher, ‘No one picture ever departed from my easil with more anxiety …’ Possibly its incompletion was part of its success.

  Fisher was told Constable’s news: ‘My wife and I are going to exhibit at the same time.’ But Maria beat him to it; her creation was indeed premature. Emily Constable was born at 10 p.m. on 29 March, the same date on which Charles Golding, her second brother, had been born four years before.3 It indicated a regularity in their marital getting-togethers in early summers, despite her frailty. Maria wasn’t at all well during the later stages of the pregnancy, and she seemed knocked about by the birth of her fifth child. Afterwards she managed to breastfeed the baby but, Constable reported to Fisher, ‘is in a sad weak condition – and we are obliged to watch her carefully’. Emily was to be also known as Emma, sometimes spelled Ema, and she figured in a sweet undated drawing Constable later did of her leaning over the arm of an elegant chair, looking up at the artist, her father, with large sad eyes.

  Despite Mr Pulham’s prognosis, there was no test of his reputation in the Academy elections that year: no member had vacated his seat, so there was no vote. There was also no sign of Fisher’s hope being fulfilled that Constable’s gold medal from France would cause ‘the stupid English public’ to think there was something in him. But Constable remained grateful for Fisher’s ‘early notice’ and ‘friendship in my obscurity’. He was sure ‘My reputation at home among my brother artists [is] dayly gaining ground, & I deeply feel the honour of having found an original style & independent of him who would be Lord over all – I mean Turner …’ (How Turner felt about Constable was kept, as was his way, well hidden.) Constable showed three paintings (including The Leaping Horse) at the Academy exhibition, which were generally admired; the Morning Chronicle mentioned ‘the pleasing peculiarities of this artist’s style’. The diarist Henry Crabb Robinson thought Turner’s Dieppe magnificent but could ‘understand why such artists as Constable and Collins are preferred’ – even in a compliment, being linked with Collins would not have pleased Constable.4 The other two RA paintings were of Hampstead – views of Branch Hill Pond and Child’s Hill – and were bought by the iron manufacturer Francis Darby after another purchaser backed out following ‘serious losses in India’. Darby’s father had built the celebrated Iron Bridge over the Severn at Coalbrookdale. Darby paid Constable 130 guineas for the Hampstead pair, getting a twenty-guinea discount on the asking price because Constable ‘felt flattered that an application should be made to me from an entire stranger … for the pictures’ sake alone’.5 With Johnny Dunthorne at hand to help, Constable then set about making a set of copies for Charles Schroth in Paris.

  Although The Leaping Horse found no purchaser in Constable’s lifetime, the year became a good one for Constable. The French Embassy had handed him his gold medal in early April. Schroth had ordered three more paintings for his gallery and the reception they received was – Schroth thought – even warmer than that given Constable’s pictures in the Louvre. A letter telling Constable about this arrived courtesy of Delacroix. Firmin Didot, a Parisian printer from the rue Jacob who was introduced by Arrowsmith, also ordered three, and Arrowsmith two more. ‘These all make income,’ Constable told Fisher, happily. In August he sent The White Horse and another painting to the Musée Royale in Lille; dear obliging Fisher had lent his prized picture for a show that year at the British Institution and perhaps expected its immediate return, but Constable sent it off to Flanders without asking. On 10 September he craved Fisher’s forgiveness for this but assumed he would be glad The White Horse was to be seen by the art lovers of Lille in company with portraits by Sir Thomas Lawrence. One of Constable’s worries hadn’t been about himself or his family but the health of his old patron Bishop Fisher. The Bishop got ‘cold in his loins’ out riding in the sharp easterly winds of early April and died a month later. His cheerful demands for brighter skies over his cathedral were gone for ever.

  Maria and the children were once again sent off to Hampstead for the summer, but it doesn’t seem to have helped either Maria or Constable. He drew her around this time, her face looking rather unhealthily swollen. He complained to Fisher at the end of their stay, ‘Hampstead is a wretched place – so expensive – and as it was so near I made my home at neither place – I was between two chairs – & could do nothing.’ He wrote to Francis Darby, ‘Could I divest myself of anxiety of mind I should never ail anything. My life is a struggle between my “social affections” and my “love of art” ’. He recalled Lord Bacon’s remark that ‘single men are the best servants of the publick’. He – Constable – had a wife in delicate health and five small children. ‘I am not happy apart from them even for a few days, or hours, and the summer months separate us too much, and disturb my quiet habits at my easil.’ Fisher had come to a similar diagnosis and wrote, ‘Whatever you do, Constable, get thee rid of anxiety. It hurts the stomach more than arsenic. It generates only fresh cause for anxiety, by producing inaction and loss of time.’ Constable acted. On 31 August he moved his family down to Brighton. They stayed first in Russell Square, an enclave of two-storey terraced houses with a central garden, a short block from the seafront, and then moved to Canne Street in December.6

  In Charlotte Street Constable resumed his journal for Maria. What he had had for dinner, visitors from Flatford, painting matters, their wedding anniversary, the cat
s and the hens. Master Billy had been pestering the goldfish, putting his paw in their bowl and frightening them, but next day was himself severely alarmed by the crowing of the cock. Friday 16 September was headlined by the journal writer ‘A Grand Epoch’:

  This morning was ushered by a prodigious battle with the fowls in the garden – the black hen making a great to-do & cackling – the cock strutting about and crowing – and Billy looking at them in great astonishment from the back kitchen window. When all was quiet I looked into the brew house & saw her on the nest which I had made, and at breakfast – Elizabeth [Sarah’s replacement as maid] brought me in a beautifull egg – probably the first hen’s egg ever laid on the premises.

  How much we have changed the circumstances of this house from what it was in Mr Farrington’s time – his attics turned into nurseries – a beautifull baby born in his bedroom – his washhouse, turned into a brew house – his back parlor, which contained all his prints, turned into a bed room – his painting room, made habitable – besides, which is best of all, made to produce better pictures than he could make …