The exhibition at Somerset House that year generally disheartened Constable. He wrote to Fisher, ‘Lawrence has many pictures, and never has his elegant affettuosa style been more happy. Jackson is the most of a painter, but he does not rank with him [Lawrence] in talent … Turner has some golden visions – glorious and beautifull, but they are only visions – yet still they are art – & one could live with such pictures in the house … Some portraits that would petrify you.’ As for Etty, recent victor in the RA stakes and contemporary cheesecake artist par excellence, it was ‘lady bums as usual’. Abram had hopes that his picture of Dedham Vale would be ready in time, as it was, and added, ‘I somehow think they must elect you next time RA but you don’t much care about it I believe.’ Abram reported that spring had been early in the Stour valley; there was good feed in the meadows for the cows – ‘everything coming into life, & such greens, & the cheerful rooks building & cawing, quite happy’. Chantrey liked Constable’s work and made an initial bid for the Hampstead landscape, but the purchase didn’t take place and the painting waited some years for a buyer – John Sheepshanks.12 Constable told Fisher the Dedham Vale painting with its view from Gun Hill down to the estuary at Mistley was perhaps his best; it had been ‘noticed (as a redeemer) by John Bull [the periodical]’. It went unsold during Constable’s lifetime. The paint sparkled as in a Rubens, but possibly a rare veteran viewer of Constable’s work might have detected that the light in his paintings was beginning to grow sadder. The dark clouds were mounting.
fn1 Constable didn’t like Turner’s white-eyed glare or ‘the shake of his head’ and obviously didn’t expect Turner’s backing.
14. Darkness Visible (1828–29)
MARIA WAS SINKING. In the spring while staying in Putney, she was for a while ‘too weak to be moved’. Constable took her to Brighton in May and there, between visits to Charlotte Street, spent long periods sitting by her couch and bedside. Sometimes, coming up for air, he went to the beach and painted, but couldn’t get her out of his mind. In late May he made several sketches of the collier Malta temporarily stranded high on the beach after a gale, with her cargo of coal being unloaded into a cart and a helping crowd shovelling shingle under her bilges to stop her heeling over; the Malta was refloated.1 One oil sketch has inscribed on the back: ‘Brighton. Sunday evening July 20 1828’; for it he used his brushes hardly at all but instead squeezed out the paint in long blobs and brandished his palette knife savagely to evoke the rough waters of the Channel under low, threatening clouds, rain coming on, the light fading.2 His state of mind doesn’t need explication. The infant Alfred was also afflicted by illness, and this time Brighton seemed to do none of the invalids any good.
Maria’s consumption was terminal. A number of their friends, including Charles Leslie, recognised this.3 After increasingly brief periods of remission the disease had now reached the ‘galloping’ stage. Maria’s last, disconnected letter to her husband was apparently written with a shaking pencil in late June when he was joined in Charlotte Street by Minna, now nine:
My Dearest John,
I part with our sweet Minna with regret but she wishes it so much I would not keep her. I wish you likewise to send me Susan & I hope you can come back yourself with Mrs A. I long to see you or would you like to wait till the next day & bring Isabel, perhaps Roberts & Emily. I look forward to the hope of [seeing you] coming at the end of this week, I trust I shall
Yours ever, M.E.C.
On receiving this Constable immediately took a Brighton coach. He remained there with Maria for nearly six weeks of ‘most untoward weather’. Then, giving up on the seaside’s recuperative powers and hoping for ‘sweet Hampstead’ to make amends, he brought her and the children back to Well Walk. For a moment the change helped; their hopes were raised; how up-and-down everything was! On 22 August he wrote to Johnny Dunthorne, ‘I believe Mrs Constable to be gaining ground. Her cough is pretty well gone and she has some appetite, and the nightly perspirations are, in a great measure, ceased. All this must be good.’ Maria’s doctors were suddenly sanguine and told Constable that Maria was on the mend. ‘Pray God this may be the case,’ Constable wrote to Dominic Colnaghi on 15 September, ‘I am much worn by anxiety.’4
Maria, towards the end
Unfortunately medical men at the time were powerless in the face of what would later be called tuberculosis. The doctors who came to treat Maria were not only without effective cures but subject to the same danger. Dr Robert Gooch, a small, dark-eyed man of thirty-four, an expert on women’s diseases, came down with consumption himself; he had given up his medical practice two years before, retiring to Windsor to become the royal librarian. Born at Yarmouth, he used to put a Constable seascape on his sofa to look at while he breakfasted, saying he was at the beach enjoying the breeze. He died in 1830, having taught Constable a Latin couplet:
Eheu! quam tenui e filo pendet
Quid quid in vita maxime arridet.
Alas! From how slender a thread hangs
All that is sweetest in life.
Herbert Evans, the Hampstead physician, took Gooch’s place in caring for Maria and the young Constables and became a friend of both the artist and Fisher.5
Maria’s illness filled the house. Shepherded by Mrs Savage, the housekeeper, and Mrs Roberts, the governess, the children did their best not to be noisy. Constable sat with Maria, while the leaves from the trees in Well Walk fell on the dry, autumnal ground. From East Bergholt Abram wrote of the fine weather which he hoped was conducive to good health and certainly elevating and cheering for the mind. On 3 October he wrote again mentioning that wheat was expensive, ‘a serious price for the poor’, and expressing to his brother his hopes, within which lay his apprehensions: ‘These things are in the hand of God.’ Constable’s sister Martha was already turning from hope to grief, and to trust in God’s wisdom and patience. On 4 October a cry of distress from the painter (and a plea for company) came to Fisher in Salisbury; he replied, ‘Your sad letter has just reached me … at a time that I fear I cannot move … I fear your friendship makes you over value the use I can be of to you; but what I can give[,] you shall have … Support yourself with your usual manliness …’ Constable’s newer friend Charles Leslie called at Well Walk in November and found Maria on a sofa in the sitting room, with its view over London. Leslie wrote, ‘Although Constable appeared in his usual spirits in her presence, yet before I left the house, he took me into another room, wrung my hand, and burst into tears, without speaking.’ Constable was too upset to function as an artist. To a client, Henry Hebbert, who wasn’t happy with some aspect of a painting of Hampstead Heath, Constable wrote, ‘I am intensely distressed & can hardly attend to any thing.’6
Leslie thought Maria endured her suffering with ‘that entire resignation to the will of Providence that she had shown under every circumstance of her life’. In the late stages of consumption the coughing was intensely painful – and also dangerous to people nearby. Speech became a whisper. There were stomach pains, vomiting and bleeding, spikes of fever in the evenings and immense lassitude. The twelve-year-old girl with big dark eyes who had first caught the fancy of John Constable in a Suffolk village now lay ‘sadly thin and weak’, on a Hampstead couch, given up to her struggle to catch breath.7
Maria died on 23 November. The woman he had called his ‘dearest life’ was buried in the graveyard of St John’s church, a short walk from Hampstead High Street. There Constable had a tomb erected against the wall of the cemetery. Dr Gooch’s favourite Latin tag was inscribed on the stonework of the tomb: Life hangs from a thread. Constable might also have used the motto on the sundial over the doorway to East Bergholt church, Ut umbra, sic vita – Life is like a shadow.8
Friends and family rallied round. From East Bergholt sister Ann apologised for ‘some passing clouds’ which might have overshadowed the affection she felt for Constable; she offered her kindest love in his great trial. Abram came to London in person, bringing words of sympathy and of trust in God
that their sister Mary had asked him to deliver. Martha Whalley paid tribute to Maria’s patience and meekness, which she was sure would be rewarded. And John Fisher wrote from Osmington ‘with the hope and intention of giving you comfort, but really I know not how. Words will not ward off irreparable loss; but if there be any consolation to the heart of man to know that another feels with him, you have that consolation, I do sympathize with you, my old and dear friend, most truly, and I pray God to give you fortitude.’
Constable, feeling hollow at heart, gathered his seven children around him. Leslie, stalwart friend, later observed that Constable continued to wear mourning for the rest of his life – but black was Constable’s style. Maria, who had faced the possibility of Constable wearing black to their wedding, might have been touched but would probably have made fun of him.9 (Leslie, with no funereal purpose, also wore black clothing as his day-to-day wear.)10
At this point Constable felt most able to pour out his heart not to Leslie, Fisher or Abram, but to his brother Golding, to whom he wrote, ‘Hourly do I feel the loss of my departed Angel – God only know[s] how my children will be brought up – nothing can supply the loss of such a devoted – sensible – industrious – religious mother – who was all affection – but I cannot trust myself on the subject – I shall never feel again as I have felt – the face of the World is totally changed to me – though with god[’s] help I shal endeavour to do my next duties –’11
Dr Evans had made friends with Fisher and on a trip to the West Country had called in Osmington to talk about their mutual friend. Evans reported to Fisher that Constable was in a state of ‘complete self-possession’. The archdeacon and the physician agreed that applying himself to his painting would be best for Constable: ‘Some of the finest works of art, and most vigorous exertions of intellect, have been the result of periods of distress.’ When Fisher and Constable wrote to one another in early January about a visit the archdeacon hoped to make to Hampstead, Fisher thought Constable ‘smitten, but not cast down’. Constable told Leslie that if he could get afloat on a six-foot canvas, he might be carried away from himself; but the job which was first offered him was a commission from Henry Greswolde Lewis of Malvern Hall to draw a mermaid for an inn sign in Warwickshire. Perhaps Lewis thought the task would cheer him up. It afforded ‘no small solace to my previous labours in landscape for the last twenty years’, Constable remarked sardonically to Leslie. The buxom mermaid looked rather fetching in a sketch Constable drew, but the actual inn sign, for the Old Mermaid & Greswolde Arms, that a sign painter was meant to produce to Constable’s drawing, was never accomplished.
Pen and ink sketch of a mermaid
When Fisher at last got to London in early February, it was to find his friend at a strange moment. The Academician W.R. Bigg – ‘Old Bigg’, painter turned restorer for reasons of a livelihood and a friendly admirer of Constable’s works – had died, and Constable’s name had once again gone forward for the vacant seat. Constable told Leslie, ‘I have little heart to face an ordeal (or rather should I not say, “run a gauntlet”) in which “kicks” are kind treatment to those “insults to the mind”, which “we candidates wretches of necessity” are exposed to annually from some “high-minded” members who stickle for the “elevated & noble” walks of art – i.e. preferring the shaggy posteriors of a Satyr to the moral feeling of landscape.’ Despite having little heart for it, Constable ran the gauntlet. In the preliminary voting he did well, but in the conclusive final round a strong rival appeared in the form of Francis Danby, poetic landscapist. Nevertheless, Constable scraped through to victory – by one vote. Alfred Chalon, a long-time supporter, called to let him know, and after him came George Jones and Turner with their congratulations. Turner stayed until 1 a.m., making up a little for long neglect. They parted, Constable said, ‘mutually pleased with one another’. Whether Turner was really happy is less certain: he had been hoping to see his friend Charles Eastlake – later President of the Academy – elected.12
Just how much Constable gained from RA sympathy after Maria’s death, we don’t know. When he called on Sir Thomas Lawrence to pay his respects, the President let him know that he thought Constable had been lucky, being only a landscape painter, to be so honoured, when many meritorious history painters – a higher class of artist! – were on the waiting list. Constable of course thought differently. His election at last was an act of justice rather than favour, but – borrowing Dr Johnson’s words to Lord Chesterfield – he let Leslie know that there was disappointment attached to the honour: ‘It has been delayed until I am solitary, and cannot impart it.’13 However, Fisher, who was staying in town at the Charterhouse, felt unalloyed pleasure at his friend’s success. ‘It is a double triumph,’ he told Constable. ‘It is in the first place the triumph of real Art over spurious art; and in the second place, of patient moral integrity over bare chicanery & misrepresented worth.’ Another long-term supporter, his brother Abram, wrote: ‘Now you are what you ought to have been years ago, RA … But your Pictures will not need any other aid than their own intrinsic genuineness & worth.’ The Dunthornes, father and son, were well pleased at his election. A few cavilled at Constable’s victory, one commentator suggesting nastily that Mr Bicknell’s money rather than Constable’s painting ability had swayed the Academicians. The same writer in the following year attacked Constable’s ‘fantastic and coarse style of painting’, by which he produced ‘powerful effects, and sometimes a remarkable degree of natural truth; but he has certainly not improved in art as he has in fortune, to which latter he entirely owes the obsequiousness of the Academy, and the long struggled-for RA’.14 It could be argued, to the contrary, that the lingering sense of Constable as a maverick artist supported by parental funds was one factor which kept him out for so long.
Whether any of the admonitions or encouragement made any difference to him other than to his sense of self-worth we can’t be sure; he had to go on painting. Abram recognised this need: ‘You will now proceed with your Picture of the Nore – & I think it will be beautiful.’ This picture was to be big, just about a six-footer. It was a subject he had had in his memory for some time. He had made a small pencil sketch of it in 1814 during his trip to the Essex shore of the Thames estuary with the Reverend Driffield, then vicar of Feering. While Mr Driffield visited his other living at Southchurch, Constable explored the area, walking on the beach at Southend and the higher ground inland. The spot, Constable had told Maria at the time, contained ‘the ruin of a castle which from its situation is a really fine place – it commands a view of the Kent hills, the Nore and North Foreland & looking many miles to sea’. The view also reminded him of his passage down river on the Coutts in 1803, when they had sailed past the Nore anchorage and rounded the North Foreland into a south-westerly gale. Hadleigh Castle at this time was two stumps of derelict thirteenth-century masonry, the biggest remnant resembling part of a huge cannon, split open and standing upright. This is the closest structure to the viewer in Constable’s full-size sketch. Also in the left foreground is a shepherd with his dog. Cattle graze on the shaggy slopes that descend to the foreshore. Across the picture, from the centre to the right-hand side, stretches a broad belt of distant, glittering, choppy water. Above, a scumbled mass of small clouds fill a windy sky.15
The finished picture for the exhibition had some of the stir smoothed out of it; but it could still be taken for two pictures, foreground and distance, land and sea, which the artist hadn’t quite tied to one another. And he referred to the painting for a while by either of two titles: Hadleigh Castle was one, The Nore the other. (At the Academy it was Hadleigh Castle. The mouth of the Thames – morning, after a stormy night.) The visible disconnection perhaps increased the sense of melancholy the painting provoked. When Constable had it ready to send to Somerset House, he asked Leslie to call in and tell him whether he should in fact enter it: ‘I am grevously [sic] nervous about it, as I am still smarting under my election. I have little enough either of self-knowledge or pr
udence (as you know) and I am pretty willing to submit to what you shall decide – with others whom I value.’ Clearly no one told Constable not to send in what he called, to Leslie, ‘my crazy old walls of the Castle’, or, to Fisher, ‘the great Castle, such as it is’.
Hadleigh Castle was accompanied by one other painting, a small landscape showing a cottage. Constable described the exhibition, or ‘pandemonium’, to Fisher: ‘Wilkie has 8 pictures – Lawrence 8, Jackson & Pickersgill 8 each. Callcott, though not 8, has one 8-feet long … Turner has some. They have an immense crash [of rejected pictures] in the hall – it is evident the Devil must vomit pictures all over London.’ In the catalogue Hadleigh Castle was bolstered by some lines from Thomson’s ‘Summer’ describing a sunrise over ‘melancholy bounds’:
Rude ruins glitter; and the briny deep,
Seen from some pointed promontory’s top,
Far to the dim horizon’s utmost verges
Restless, reflects a floating gleam.
On one of the varnishing days the mischief-making sculptor Chantrey – who had altered Constable’s sheep in The Cornfield – approached Hadleigh Castle, saying the foreground looked too cold. With Leslie for witness, Chantrey took the palette from Constable’s reluctant hand and spread a glaze of asphaltum – derived from tar – over the offending section. Constable, alarmed, said to Leslie, ‘There goes all my dew.’ When Chantrey had moved on to make one of his improvements or practical jokes elsewhere, Constable wiped off the dark glaze and carefully restored the foreground glitter.16
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