John Constable

by Anthony Bailey

  The Constables’ sixth child, and third son, was born just after breakfast on 14 November 1826, ‘a month before time’. The infant was christened Alfred Abram Constable; his godparents – among them two cousins – were Colonel Richard Gubbins and Mr and Mrs Lionel South. Maria had difficulty nursing the baby owing to her ‘extream weakness’, as he told his sister Ann just before Christmas, though Alfred was ‘as pretty a little fellow as ever was seen’. Constable seems finally to have realised that children cost money; more children meant more expenditure. He wrote to Fisher about his increased progeny: ‘It is an awfull concern – and the reflection of what may be the consequences both to them and myself makes no small inroad into that abstractedness, which had hitherto been devoted to painting only. But I am willing to consider them as blessings – only that I am now satisfied and think my quiver full enough.’ If only he would follow those words with resolution!

  The arrival of the new child determined Constable to find a permanent Hampstead home for his brood. His idea was ‘to prevent if possible the sad rambling life which my married life has been, flying from London to seek health in the country’. He kept the lower part of his Charlotte Street house including the painting room and sub-let the top part to Mr Sykes, an ‘agreeable’ dancing teacher, and his wife. He told Fisher: ‘I am three miles from door to door … & I can get always away from idle callers – and above all see nature – & unite a town & country life.’ In the summer of 1827 he found what he had been looking for, a terraced house in Well Walk, Hampstead; it was on four floors with the kitchen in the cellar, cost one pound a week in rent, and was close to the Heath in one direction and to the centre of the village in the other. A supposedly health-giving chalybeate well was just across the road. Hampstead waters had brought the place to prominence as a spa in the previous century. The metallic-tasting water had iron-bearing properties; it was dispensed in a pump room and sold bottled at two inns, the Lower Flask and Upper Flask, and the retail price in the City of London was threepence per flask. (The water was declared undrinkable in 1903.)3 Begging a loan from Fisher to help pay for moving-in expenses and workmen’s bills, Constable described the house as ‘to my wife’s heart’s content – it is situate on the eminence at the back of the spot in which you saw us – and our little drawing room commands a view unequalled in Europe – from Westminster Abbey to Gravesend. The dome of St. Paul’s in the air, realizes Michael Angelo’s idea on seeing that of the Pantheon – “I will build such a thing in the sky.” ’ Fisher was also hard-stretched at the time but exerted himself to find £30 to send Constable.

  A large chunk of Constable’s past had fallen away in early February 1827. Sir George Beaumont – ‘the leader of Taste’ – had died. Constable wrote to Wordsworth nine years later to say of Sir George, ‘I feel that I am indebted to him for what I am as an artist.’ He always remembered his first meeting with Sir George in Dedham in the mid-1790s and was grateful for the consequent instruction by way of Claude and Wilson, Girtin and Cozens, and Sir Joshua’s Discourses that gave him a foundation on which to build his own natural painture. Moreover, even if he hadn’t observed Sir George’s ‘Rules’, he would never forget them – that in every landscape there should be at least one brown tree; and that every picture should have a first, second and third light. Sir George had once looked at a Constable painting and said, in his headmasterly fashion, ‘I see your first and second lights, but I can’t make out which is the third.’4

  Alfred’s whooping cough – a dreadful echo of his mother’s – dominated the domestic scene in April. The doctors called frequently but couldn’t cure it. Constable’s sister Martha wrote from Dedham with a belated home remedy and the assurance that time would fix Alfred’s cough. Constable kept on working, particularly on a Brighton beach scene showing the new Chain Pier, opened in 1823. This ‘dandy jetty’ as he had called it gave him some problems; the pier was too short so he decided to lengthen it; a sail on a boat had to be painted out to accommodate the new pier end; a boat being hauled up on the beach was deleted altogether. He finished the picture in time for the Academy exhibition. Fisher came to Hampstead the day before Constable sent it in and thought the painting ‘most beautifully executed’, so much so that ‘Turner, Callcott, and Collins will not like it’. In The Chain Pier, Brighton one was aware of an onshore breeze, small combers crunching the shingle, a bright sun streaming down through a procession of woolly clouds, the smell of salt in the sea-damp air. But whatever the thoughts of his fellow artists and competitors, Constable failed to unload it. He wrote to Fisher: ‘My Brighton was admired – “on the walls,” – and I had a few nibbles out of doors. I had one letter (from a man of rank) inquiring what would be its “selling” price. Is not this too bad – but that comes of the bartering at the Gallery …’ The press was mixed. The Times thought it one of Constable’s best: ‘He is unquestionably the first landscape painter of the day, and yet we are told his pictures do not sell. He accounts for this by stating that he prefers studying nature as she presents herself to his eyes rather than as she is represented in old pictures …’ But The New Monthly Magazine declared that Constable’s ‘usual freshness of colouring, and crispness and spirit of touch’ were out of place in a non-rural subject, and the Morning Post thought it looked as though streaks of ink had been dashed across it. His other two RA exhibits were Gillingham Mill, with much brilliantly observed vegetation on the nearside of a foaming millstream, and a Hampstead Heath.5 This was the year Johnny Dunthorne exhibited for the first time at Somerset House with an early-Constable-like subject, A Glade in a Wood. Constable must have felt some vicarious pride.

  It was also the summer in which George Canning, the Prime Minister, got Britain together with Russia and France in the Treaty of London to prevent the extermination of the Greeks by the Turks and Egyptians. And it was the summer in which William Blake – poet, painter, prophet – died. Constable was concerned about Blake’s widow and wrote to John Linnell that the AGBI would act at once if the situation were urgent. In early September the Constables’ Well Walk neighbour the comic actor Jack Bannister came to dinner. Constable had described Bannister to John Fisher as ‘a very fine creature … very sensible, natural, and a gentleman’. The actor enjoyed Constable’s paintings (he bought one of Branch Hill Pond) and Lady Dysart’s venison. A great lover of puns, he had been a student at the Royal Academy and a pupil of de Loutherbourg when that artist – whom he nicknamed Lantern-bag or Leatherbag – was a scene painter at Drury Lane. Later, Bannister modelled for the figure of Sterne’s Uncle Toby in Charles Leslie’s Uncle Toby and the Widow Wadman. Constable seems to have shared the feeling expressed by William Hazlitt, when Bannister quit the stage in 1815, of a sense of the personal intimacy one feels with actors: ‘We greet them on the stage; we like to meet them in the streets; they almost always recall to us pleasant associations.’ But Leslie noted that although ‘few persons more thoroughly relished good acting than did Constable’, he seldom visited a theatre. On one occasion when he did, the machinery lowering the actor playing the ghost of Hamlet’s father got stuck, and then was suddenly released, to much applause. Constable told the story to a neighbour named Pope, who said that he too would never forget it; he was the ghost.6

  In October he decided it had been too long since his last real holiday in East Bergholt – nine years – and he wanted to fix the place in the heads and hearts of his children. Johnny Dunthorne was also in Suffolk, painting a portrait. But this time brother Abram took some convincing. He wrote to Constable at the end of September to say that he thought Flatford at this season a dangerous place for the young ones: ‘It would be impossible to enjoy your company, as your mind would be absorb’d & engross’d with the children and their safety.’ Abram clearly knew John was a worrier, but on this occasion he didn’t change Constable’s mind. Constable took only the two oldest, John Charles and Minna, and this perhaps caused a smaller impact on the solely adult household of Abram and Mary at Flatford Mill. In any event, the childre
n at once made a good impression. Mrs Godfrey, wife of the squire, was much taken with them. The elderly widow Mrs Hart, to whom Constable had given small sums for some years, was the grateful recipient of his charity on this occasion by way of John Charles. The locals were keen to see the fourth generation of the family in East Bergholt: ‘All heads are out of the doors & windows,’ Constable wrote proudly to Maria, telling her the children were acclaimed as ‘the best behaved ever’. Captain Bowen, a neighbour, gave Minna a rose and young John a bunch of grapes. Brother and sister were most entranced by the river. John Charles caught six fish one day and ten the next, some of which they had for dinner. Minna caught two.

  A barge on the Stour

  Minna must have thought the Stour valley was going to be a wild place. When the Ipswich coach crossed Stratford St Mary bridge her father had said, ‘Now we are in Suffolk,’ and she replied, ‘Oh no, this is only fields.’ She found Suffolk at first ‘very like Hampstead’, though she felt the blackberries here were better. The children were kept busy calling on friends and relatives. Young John had ridden on horseback to his uncle Golding’s newly purchased small farmhouse, opposite the windmill, ‘a sad tumble down place & very old’, that Golding called the Pie’s Nest.

  Constable when relating to Maria the doings of the children didn’t neglect any local gossip he thought might interest her, such as the bilious attack suffered by Mr Travis and the wedding in Dedham of ‘Miss Bell & a Mr Spink a horse surgeon – God knows who they are – but the bells rang all day’. He would have news for Lady Dysart, too, about ‘Mr Fitzgerald who has certainly behaved ill to Golding’, by trying to get his hands on Old Hall Wood. When he was with his brother Golding, or writing to him, Constable sometimes fell into local patois or the sort of language brothers can use to one another: Bergholt was ‘Bargell’ and a bedbug-free bed was ‘free from the buggery’.7

  Constable appeared to relish telling Maria of the presents Minna and he had for her; his was ‘a little pretty box for you for needles’. Perhaps he felt he had to tell her now about the gift; he didn’t dare wait. But as though to show him there was nothing to fear, Maria went to church on Sunday 11 October (‘I know you will scold’) and paid for it by spending all next day in bed. She was again seven months pregnant. He couldn’t stop getting her with child. She wrote to him that there had been a burglary in Downshire Hill (silver spoons, taken by a man dressed as a former sailor, selling pencils – he was nabbed for the theft). There had also been a delivery of coal Constable had forgotten to warn her of and – oh yes – old Mr Stothard had called, unexpectedly.

  On his return, there was something to pay for the pleasures of the holiday. Constable was, or felt, broke. He was very down, as he often was when he got back home. He had sent The Cornfield to the Louvre to show at the salon, but there was no great acclaim this time, and no Arrowsmiths or Schroths came forward to buy it. Writing to Golding he said he envied him his sequestered life. Well Walk, though providing a comfortable house, was not living up to its name. When he, John and Minna got back from East Bergholt, Maria had been sure she would be ‘quite well & happy’. The birth of Lionel Bicknell Constable, their seventh child, at 4.45 p.m. on 2 January 1828 at first produced no complications. Constable exulted to Fisher on ‘the birth of a lovely boy’ and wrote to Leslie that Maria ‘goes on nursing famously, and went to church this morning’. On 23 February Henry Greswolde Lewis of Malvern Hall sent a game pie – a typical Dysart gift – and his hopes both that ‘Mrs Constable will find it to her palette [sic]’ and, unrelatedly, that Constable ‘will be the British Claude in after time’.8 But any reinvigorating effect of the birth was of short duration. Another letter to Leslie in early February remarked on Maria’s most delicate condition; by spring Leslie was fully aware of Constable’s alarm. Constable wrote to Samuel Lane: ‘My poor wife is still very ill at Putney, and when I can get her home I know not. We talk of Brighton, but we only talk of it. She can’t make such a journey. I am glad to remain quiet at my work, as I want to rid my mind of some troublesome jobs.’9

  To add to his gloom The Chain Pier, Brighton – though hung prominently at the British Institution along with Bonington and Delacroix – got some harsh notices. The critic for the London Magazine said that under it might be written,

  ‘Nature done in white lead, opal, or prussian blue.’ The end is perfectly answered; why the means should be obtruded as an eye-sore, we do not understand. It is like keeping up the scaffolding, after the house is built. It is evident that Mr Constable’s landscapes are like nature; it is still more evident that they are paint. There is no attempt made to conceal art. It is a love of the material vehicle, or a pride in slovenliness and crudity, as the indispensable characteristics of national art; as some orators retain their provincial dialect, not to seem affected.10

  Constable wasn’t above lobbying this year at the Academy. John Flaxman had died, making a vacancy among the RAs. Constable went through the necessary motions and called on a number of the members, urging nothing (he said) but showing only his ‘long face’. He wrote to both Charles Leslie and Thomas Phillips, hoping for support. As for Turner, Constable told Leslie, ‘My call on him was quite amusing. He held his hands down by his sides – looked me full in the face (his head on one side) – smiled and shook his head & asked me what I wanted, angry that I called on a Monday afternoon. He asked me if I had not a “neighbour at Hampstead who could help me” – Collins. I told him we were no longer intimate & I know nothing about him – he then held fast the door …’ After this Turner ‘went growling to Chantrey.’fn1 Stothard and Leslie were firm Constable supporters but Phillips seemed to hold Constable’s French fame against him. With most members Constable was still ‘only’ a landscape painter. William Etty, his main rival, was elected by a clear majority.11

  While worrying about Maria, Constable went on with his paintings for the exhibition in May: two landscapes, one of Dedham Vale, the other of Hampstead Heath. His twin poles, you might say. The former showed the bridge at Stratford St Mary in the middle distance with some gypsies camped inconspicuously in the foreground; it conveyed a quiet tribute to Sir George Beaumont, whose Hagar had helped inspire his original Dedham Vale of 1802. In one respect, the Constables’ lives were suddenly made easier. On 9 March Maria’s father died, aged seventy-six. Charles Bicknell had resigned his post at the Admiralty in early January when his health finally collapsed and thereafter he appeared doomed, though in no great pain. Despite a long history of complaints about his straitened circumstances, the lawyer of Spring Gardens left a tidy fortune to his three surviving children: Sarah Fletcher, a daughter from his first marriage, and Maria and Louisa, the remaining children of the five from his second. Mrs Fletcher, previously widowed, had inherited a large amount from her first husband, Mr Skey, so the bulk of the estate was divided between Maria and Louisa, some £20,000 each.

  Joy was not confined. Nor was this so only among the immediate beneficiaries. Abram wrote from Flatford on hearing the news, surprised by ‘the extent of Mr B’s property’. He was thankful that John was ‘thus put into possession of the means of bringing up your family as you could wish’. (By the law of the day, a married woman’s property was her husband’s.) The benefaction was particularly welcome because the Constable businesses were going through a bad patch and Abram hadn’t been able to send out the usual payments to his brothers and sisters. They were all thrilled at the Bicknell bequest. So was John Dunthorne Senior. ‘How happy I have made old Mr D by telling them of your good fortune,’ reported Abram. The word spread quickly around East Bergholt. Mr Revans was told and so was Mr Woodgate, two of the senior Mr Constable’s executors. What would the Reverend Rhudde have said at this late tweak to the tale of the Constable–Bicknell connection?

  Constable felt a great burden lifted from him. He said he intended to settle the money on Maria and the children. On 11 June he told Fisher that he could now ‘stand before a 6-foot canvas with a mind at ease (thank God)’. Just as well, since Mr Syk
es, the dancing master who had taken part of the Charlotte Street house, had failed to pay the rent. One other bothersome thing was that Johnny Dunthorne was spreading his own wings. Johnny’s usefulness couldn’t be minimised, but he was now thirty and had built up his own list of clients for portraits and restoration work. He had painting commissions in London and East Anglia – he had recently repainted the sign on the Duke of Marlborough Inn in Dedham, originally painted by his father in 1809. There were suggestions that Constable harboured some hurt feelings about this independence, and Abram once again tried to help. After seeing Johnny in East Bergholt when he was there for his sister Hannah’s wedding, Abram tried to get across to Constable that Johnny’s attachment was as strong as ever. However, Johnny also believed that Constable’s ‘natural temperament & ardent mind must & does harass anyone constantly with you’. Of course, nothing could obliterate Johnny’s attachment and gratitude to Constable. Yet the younger man had his own jobs to do, debt was death to him, and – Abram implied – Constable ought to understand Johnny’s feelings.