Some critics were impressed by Constable’s elegiac morning-after. The Literary Gazette thought it very powerful. The Times admired it as ‘highly natural’. And the Morning Chronicle called it a noble picture in Constable’s ‘peculiar but forcible style’. (The writer of this, still showing some restraint, was Edward Dubois, who was to make almost a profession of increasingly acerbic commentary on Constable.) However, Leslie believed the picture ‘received rather rougher usage than usual from the newspaper critics’. By some, Constable’s ‘disagreeable’, ‘disfigured’ and ‘mannered’ surfaces were given prime attention: the Gentleman’s Magazine said his scenes appeared to be scattered over ‘with a huge quantity of chopped hay’, and the Sun qualified its praise of the Castle’s ‘nature and spirit’ with ‘though freckled and pock-marked’. As did The Times, noting the artist’s habit of ‘scattering white spots over the surface of his picture’.17 Turner, too, was accused of splattering his canvases with soapsuds and whitewash, so there were ironies when he was credited that year with making similar accusations against the new RA member. (Constable returned the compliment by passing on to Fisher the gossip that one of Turner’s pictures had been compared with a ‘spitting box’ at a hospital.) No one offered to buy the Castle. Perhaps no one wanted to feel the anguish that lay within the pockmarks produced by Constable’s palette knife. The ‘floating gleam’ – indeed ‘every gleam of sunshine’ – was now blighted for him, as he was to write to Leslie in 1834. One also remembers his uncle David Pike Watts’s remark to Constable in 1811 that ‘cheerfulness is wanted in your landscapes; they are tinctured with a sombre darkness.’ Surely this time with reason.18
Constable had some social engagements in spring that cheered him up a bit. On the penultimate day of the British Institution exhibition he dined with Wilkie, who was a delight as always, but the occasion wasn’t all agreeable because among the company was Collins, in a masterful mood, and even more unfortunately Reinagle.19 It was perhaps Constable’s relief at getting through dinner and heading home that was displayed in a sketch attached to a letter to Leslie. Constable showed himself leaning out of the back of one of the new horse-drawn omnibuses rattling down the Strand, waving his exhibition catalogue at the animal painter Edwin Landseer and the collector William Wells, who were in the cab behind, waving their catalogues. (The first regular bus service began that year, from Paddington Green to the Bank of England.)20 He also dined with Leslie and spent an afternoon with John Jackson, talking about art and artists; Constable said, ‘The art is now filled with Phantasmagoria.’ He had had a cold that lasted two months, and Fisher thought he was deranged to concentrate so much of his painting effort into that season: ‘You choose February & March for composition, when the strongest men get irritable & uncomfortable, during the prevalence of the N.E. winds, the great destruction of the frame … in England.’ Fisher added that London at that time was like ‘a deep cellar in the infernal regions reserved for the most desperate … See Milton’s Cold Hell.’ Consequently he saw a good deal of Herbert Evans in Hampstead, the physician to whose medical skills he remained grateful. Evans accompanied him on a last look at the Academy exhibition and said he would join Constable and Fisher when they got together soon in Salisbury.
Such a trip had been talked about frequently since 1821. This time, despite Fisher’s expectation that Constable would call it off, Constable booked places in ‘the little Salisbury coach’ for Tuesday 7 July for himself, John Charles and Minna, promising to be at Fisher’s for teatime. He kept his promise. It was now seventeen years since Bishop Fisher first brought the two men together, and the younger Fisher had become Constable’s best patron and best friend. Constable opened his heart to him about the Academy: ‘as usual in bodies corporate – the lowest bred and greatest fools are the leaders’. And the acute and forthright Fisher, who was well looked after by the body corporate of the Church of England, had a like asperity, condemning Oxbridge missionaries for making ‘Christianity a stern haughty thing. Think of St. Paul with a full blown wig, deep shovel hat, apron, round belly, double chin, stern eye, rough voice, and imperious manner, drinking port wine, and laying down the law of the best way of escaping the operation of the Curates Residence Act’ – a piece of recent legislation designed to cut down on the multiple livings for senior clergy that produced many impoverished curates. Often lonely among his fellow painters in the crowded art world, Constable was lucky to have Fisher for confidant and supporter. In November 1824 Fisher told his friend, ‘Your fame is your pole star.’ When Constable became an RA, Fisher said, ‘The event is important to me, since my judgement was embarked in the same boat with your success.’ And on 30 April 1829 he wrote, ‘Whenever I find a man despising the false estimates of the vulgar, and daring to aspire – in sentiment, language, and conduct – to what the highest wisdom, through every age, has taught us as most excellent, to him I unite myself by a sort of necessary attachment.’
Constable, John Charles and Minna stayed at Leydenhall, the large house in the cathedral close that Fisher had had since 1819. Archdeacon and prebendary, he had only to be in residence three months of the year. The garden contained a very tall alder tree, backed on to the River Avon, and had a distant view of Harnham Ridge. Constable made several free oil stetches from the windows of Leydenhall, looking out to West Harnham. He painted the river itself, the water meadows and the pollarded willows on its banks. And he sketched Fisher, who was himself sketching, wearing a top hat, and standing with his dogs in a riverside glade. The two friends went out on several trips in the nearby country, including one to Old Sarum, the hill which had once been the site of a ‘city’; the first Parliament had been held there under King John in 1205, and despite now having only seven inhabitants, it continued to send two members to the House of Commons. Constable did several large sketches of the great mound; a wonderful watercolour followed. As Leslie noted, Constable had to be interested by ‘a city turned into a landscape’. He made some sky studies, out of doors and from his bedroom, and sketched the cathedral again, once with a rainbow.21
At the end of July Constable went back to London, leaving twelve-year-old John and Minna, aged ten, with the Fishers. But Leydenhall suddenly became crowded. The Fisher’s eldest son, Osmond, had come home from Eton. Two of Mary Fisher’s brothers turned up, one with his wife and child. Fisher had to apologise that young John was first ‘reduced to a leathern sofa’ for a bed, and then sent home, though Minna, Fisher’s godchild, got to remain. Fisher wrote to her father on 9 August: ‘Minna grows into favour every day. Her spirits get more buoyant, & she skips about like a gazelle. Her manners are naturally very good, & a little stay where she will mix with company will ensure them.’ Fisher’s loving observations must have cheered Constable greatly about his motherless daughter. Mary Fisher saw that Minna’s education wasn’t neglected and sent her on improving jaunts, to the law courts, for example, to hear trials. Fisher wrote in early September: ‘Minna is the nicest child in the house possible. Nobody would know of her existence if she were not seen. She improves in her French and otherwise – her ear is perfect.’ Only that hint of Minna’s near invisibility suggests that sometimes she was hugging her loss to herself. Minna added a postscript to a letter to Constable from Mary Fisher: ‘I am so happy here that I should like to stay here as long as you like to keep me here,’ and signed herself by one of her pet names, ‘Ladybird’. When sickness ran through his house, Fisher thoughtfully kept the news from Constable, knowing he would worry about Minna. (The Fishers’ youngest boy had scarlatina and a servant lad named Robert died of ‘repletion’ – which sounds like overeating.) Constable sent to Leydenhall a haunch of venison and a small painting which Fisher said he was going to hang over the piano, under the Claude, in the ‘first drawing room’.
Constable managed another short trip to Salisbury in mid-November, when he came to take Minna home; he then gave Mary Fisher some painting lessons and made several drawings, one from the bottom of Leydenhall’s garden. Fisher had tol
d him that ‘the Church under a cloud’ was the best subject he could take, and Constable was apparently thinking of making another picture of the cathedral. They were to meet again elsewhere but, though of course neither of them knew it, this was to be their last meeting in Salisbury.
Their friendship had involved a number of money transactions, generally when Fisher bought Constable pictures and lent or advanced money if the painter’s cash flow required temporary help. Now Fisher was hard-stretched. None of the land rent he was owed in Gillingham had been paid; he told Constable that his thoughts were ‘compelled to run in the current of mere pounds & shillings’. By mid-December he asked a favour: could Constable take back two paintings, at least for the time being? Apparently, though he didn’t name them, the pictures were The White Horse, the first six-footer, and Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s Grounds, which he had taken over from his uncle. Constable had to sell some government stock to obtain the agreed two hundred pounds but probably wasn’t unhappy about regaining the paintings. He disliked losing control of any of his pictures, even for money. With Fisher and Tinney, as we have seen, he had often borrowed back his paintings and then been loath to return them to their ‘owners’. On one occasion he gave the younger landscape painter F.R. Lee two reasons he didn’t sell his works: ‘When I paint a bad picture I don’t like to part with it, and when I paint a good one, I like to keep it.’22 As for John Fisher, he was grieved to part with his Constables. But six children made them ‘valuable luxuries’ he couldn’t at that moment afford. In addition, Fisher hadn’t been well; he complained of problems with his chest and larynx, and of heart palpitations.
In late October Abram had reported from East Bergholt the serious illness of James Inglis, married to a relative John Constable had painted as a girl, Jane Mason of Colchester; the Inglises had six young children. Abram was also distressed by the death of his ‘faithful and sensible’ dog, Pickle, aged ten. Fortunately Johnny Dunthorne had not long before done a portrait of Pickle that was now ‘doubly valuable’. Pickle had accompanied Abram on a round of family visits the previous day, walking with him from Flatford into the village and to Golding’s cottage. The dog was taken ill just before they got to sister Ann’s and Abram was undoubtedly going to miss him – ‘He was valuable & useful & very agreeable.’ Constable wrote to Golding from Charlotte Street on 3 December thanking him for ‘a most handsome present’, perhaps for young John, whose birthday it was next day; he was happy to hear that all was quiet in the woods.23 In family letters Constable had begun to sound a bit the way his mother had in her letters to him. However, to Golding he wrote with a fraternal frankness which would have horrified Ann Constable. Sending off to Golding some furniture for his rebuilt house near the windmill, Constable listed some of the items, including ‘the shit pot … carefully packed … no bad thing … in a cold showery night on Bargell heath when taken short’.24 Although Abram advised Constable to make allowances for Golding’s ‘singularity’, preparing him for Golding’s failure to thank Constable for his kindness – presumably most of all for getting him his job with Lady Dysart – there is no evidence Golding was anything but grateful.
It was a fierce winter. In Osmington Fisher said it had been Siberian. ‘The snow drifted to ten & twelve feet between this place & Weymouth: and the road by the Sea-beach was completely blocked up.’ Mary Fisher was a sad invalid during ‘this most ungenial season’, and the archdeacon was now unwell with what was thought to be gout, asthma and high blood pressure. Another victim of the season was Sir Thomas Lawrence. The President of the Royal Academy suddenly succumbed and died in early January 1830 – a man ‘suited to the age, and the age to him’, as Benjamin Haydon remarked. Lawrence was only sixty, and seemed to younger colleagues like Leslie to be painting better and better portraits. Constable, who had by no means been close to him, was distressed by Lawrence’s death and went with Wilkie to the funeral in St Paul’s. Haydon was there and recalled seeing them together: ‘Cope, the city marshal, stood before them in a splendid cocked hat. Wilkie was fond of painting cocked hats; and while looking down with all the semblance of woe said to Constable, “Just look at that cocked hat. It’s grand!” ’25 Turner was standing nearby and overheard the remark which he thought wrong on this solemn occasion. Constable noticed him looking away in disgust, and approved of Turner’s reaction.26 Although Lawrence hadn’t classed landscape in the highest ranks of art, he had – according to the engraver David Lucas – thought Constable’s paintings ‘ferocious’. An unusual description for the time, and not a bad one.27
15. Seven Children (1830–31)
AT THE START of 1830 the Constable children ranged in age from Lionel, just two, to John Charles, twelve. Minna was ten and a half. She was ill in the spring, with a bad cold and a sore throat, and a doctor named Harris came to see her every morning for a week. She had been exchanging letters with Emma Fisher, who had recently had braces – a ‘horrid gold machine’ – fitted to her teeth, and the two girls discussed the Keepsake annual, copies of which they kept in locked drawers, so that no grown-ups could get hold of them. John Fisher thought the romantic stories in the periodical ‘morbid’ and didn’t want Emma to read it; he was evidently unsuccessful in this. Perhaps to counteract the dreaded Keepsake, Constable gave Minna a prayer book in June. Minna was having music lessons with a Hampstead neighbour, Mr Frith, while attending Miss Sophia Noble’s school. She had been going to Miss Noble’s since 1827 and her younger sisters followed her. Constable was an indulgent and devoted father. His first-born John Charles was found as often in Constable’s arms as in those of his nurse or even his mother. Leslie often heard Constable say, ‘Children should be respected’, and when the Leslies had another child in 1831, Constable confided to his friend, ‘They were happy days with me when I had infants.’1
On 31 January 1830 Constable wrote to his friend expressing his disappointment that a planned visit from Leslie and his wife hadn’t occurred, though he understood the reason: Leslie had toothache, which Constable knew all about. It was particularly sad because ‘my little girls were all in “apple-pie order” to be seen. My dear Maria had been practising her steps and music all day that she might appear to advantage. All my boys were in their best, and had allowed a total clearance of the drawing room of their numerous ships, castles, books, bricks, drawings, &c …’ Several years before, a doctor from Brighton, George Young, had encountered a permissive father on a visit to Charlotte Street. Constable took him to his painting room to show him a picture he was working on. When he got to his easel, so Young reported, Constable found that ‘one of his little boys had dashed the handle of the hearth-broom through the canvas, and made so large a rent as to render its restoration impossible. He called the child up to him and asked him gently if he had done it. When the boy admitted that he had, he rebuked him in these unmeasured terms: “Oh! my dear pet! See what we have done! Dear, dear! What shall we do to mend it? I can’t think – can you?”’2
Constable built for his boys a large playroom with a glass roof in the courtyard behind the house in Charlotte Street. Robert Leslie, one of Charles Leslie’s sons, recalled among the toys there ‘a most complete working model of a fire-engine’. One of the Constable boys cut holes in a large box meant to represent a house, filled it with wood shavings, and set fire to it. ‘Another boy then rang a small bell, and the model engine appeared, but had scarcely begun to play upon the flaming box when Constable, to whose studio the dense smoke had found its way, came among us, and saying, “I can’t have any more of this,” looked for a can of water to put out the fire; while the author of the mischief coolly turned the hose of the little engine on the back of his father’s head.’ Instead of being furious with the boy, Constable treated it as a joke, and after the fire was extinguished went back to his easel. John Charles remained interested in fire engines for a number of years. When his younger brother Charles Golding was at school on the south coast, John Charles wrote to him and asked, ‘Let me know what kind of fire engin
[sic] there is at Folkestone.’3
Two indispensable people in the widower’s house were Mrs Savage, the housekeeper, and Mrs Roberts – called variously Bob or Bobs – the children’s nurse. Constable told his friends that Mrs Savage belied her name.4 Mrs Roberts had come on the scene in 1821 after Charles Golding’s birth and held things together thereafter; her caring talents were recognised by Abram in a letter to his nephew John Charles in 1839: ‘She is a valuable friend & millions would not purchase such a one.’ On one occasion she took John Charles down to Brighton to help him get over an illness, and her charge wrote home to Papa to say, ‘Roberts as [sic] had a ducking in the see.’ When Charles Golding was off at school in Folkestone Roberts wrote to him just before his birthday gently admonishing him to attend to his studies, ‘for learning makes the man’. She told him to be careful of his clothes for ‘salt water soon spoils them’, and reminded him to write to his sister Emily for her birthday; she would be eight on the same day he was twelve. And lastly she urged him to write to his ‘Poor Old Nurse. But out of Sight out of mind.’ She went on sending parcels of clothes and food to the two older boys when they were away at school, and when Charles Golding – always interested in boats – finally went to sea, aged fourteen, one of his last letters from Portsmouth ended, ‘Tell Bob she had made me very comfortable, what should I have done without her.’ Constable felt truly ‘helpless’ when she had severe rheumatism in 1836.5
Constable took his motherless offspring on trips, a few at a time. They often visited the Leslies, and in 1829 he went with several of the youngsters to the Countess of Dysart, ‘the last of the Tollemaches’, at Ham House near Richmond; she was ‘very kind to and pleased with my children’. They went on to Wimbledon to call on their aunt Louisa, now, since her marriage three months before, Mrs John Sanford. Constable thought Louisa hadn’t married well; in fact she had ‘sadly dished herself’, and was feeling it. ‘She cried & kissed the children a good deal.’ Minna got to stay with ‘her foolish aunt’ on several occasions, ‘a great sacrifice’ on her father’s part; he missed her exceedingly. Dear Minna was trying hard to fill her mother’s role; at the age of eleven she was teaching her younger siblings the three Rs during the Christmas holidays. He wrote to Leslie, ‘She is so orderly in all her plans, and so full of method – so lady-like by nature – and so firm and yet so gentle that you cannot beleive the influence of this heavenly little monitor on this whole house – but most of all on me, who look and watch on all her dear ways with mingled smiles and tears … Should I live, and this dear image of her mother be spared to me, what a blessing and comfort to my old age.’ In 1831 Constable took Minna, Isabel and Emily down to Dedham to stay with his sister Martha. Back at work in Charlotte Street he wrote at once to Minna. He told her about a great to-do caused by their black cat, which had got out of the attic window and prowled along to the roof of the Fitzroy chapel, where it spent all night in the rain (presumably howling), until rescued by a man sent aloft by their neighbour Mrs Johnson. And he let her know that John, Charley, Alfred and Lionel were quite well although Alfie had cut his finger several times while trying to make a model boat. Minna thoughtfully collected around Dedham a great many insects for her brother Charles. After telling her father about this, she closed one letter ‘Good buy says Maria’.6
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