Allowing for the odd spelling idiosyncrasy (in which they followed their father), the Constable girls were well taught at Elizabeth House, Miss Sophia Noble’s school in Hampstead. Handwriting, piano-playing, dancing and comportment were elements of instruction.7 The boys’ education was more of a worry. Constable’s own early experience at Lavenham, where he had been beaten by the usher, led him to want to keep his sons close at hand. Fisher had told him how at Eton, where his son Osmond was a pupil, the ‘pedagogues flog little boys’ bottoms’. Constable thought that if his sons were sent away to school they would be ‘plunged into accumulative evil’. Without Maria’s guidance he was a softie. Charles seems to have been a normally rambunctious youth, who could take care of himself, but Constable was perhaps rightly worried about the oldest, ‘my darling boy John’, who was often ill.8 He told Leslie, ‘In this sweet youth I see all that gentleness – affection – fine intellect & indeed all those endearing qualities, which rendered his departed mother so dear to me – but I must not trust my heart on this subject – my greivous wound only slumbers.’
Early in 1831 Constable’s cousin Jane South, née Gubbins, who lived just off the Strand in London and was the mother of six, suggested hiring an instructor for the two oldest boys. She had someone to recommend: young Charles Boner, a Twickenham youth of German parentage, who was ‘very gentle & very clever’. He could come to Charlotte Street every day from nine to eleven to teach the boys, ‘for a guinea a week the two’. Constable said yes. Boner was going to be sixteen in April – barely two years older than John Charles. His father was a German mathematician who was interested in – among other things – the magnetic variation of compasses. Poetic, sensitive, religious, serious: all epithets that fitted young Boner; and he was also, what may have especially appealed to Constable, undemanding. Boner agreed to the guinea a week though soon he was being paid £20 a quarter, which was roughly five shillings a week more. In late October Constable, depressed and ill, suddenly felt he couldn’t afford Boner and gave him notice. But the ‘termination’ never happened. The clouds cleared. Constable realised that Boner was already invaluable. Though he acted older than his years and indeed sometimes seemed to lack humour – he took many of Constable’s sardonic sallies with unsmiling gravity – both John and Charles liked him and referred to him as ‘Old Bo’. And he soon became – following in Johnny Dunthorne’s footsteps – Constable’s general assistant: message-carrier, proof-reader, picture-packer, as well as part-time tutor to the boys; he was always helpful, always amiable.9
Johnny Dunthorne – in some respects another of Constable’s children – was spreading his own wings. In 1828 Constable wrote paternally to Johnny, who had been offered a restoration job at the church in Nayland, ‘I hope you will do it, but only in conjunction with your father. It requires not a moment’s hesitation. Take care of cold. Work with the doors and windows of the church open; if it should make it colder, it will drive out damp and the smell of graves.’ Johnny continued to work on Constable’s pictures – Constable wrote to Leslie in February 1830 that ‘a sketch of the lane and cottage would be all the better for a little of John Dunthorne’s varnish’. This was possibly a version of The Glebe Farm Constable had given Leslie.10 Not long before Martha Whalley had written from Dedham to say how delighted they all were at Johnny’s ‘prosperity & promise, & doubt not that he will continue to flourish – & please’. In 1831 Johnny brought Constable a letter from his sister Ann and a batch of Bergholt stories. She said, ‘He is a very deserving young person and makes friends wherever he goes.’ Johnny was increasingly in demand as a restorer. Fisher met Mrs Anne Michel, the wife of a general; she praised Dunthorne’s cleaning of a Reynolds portrait and was surprised that Fisher knew Johnny already. More and more collectors were patronising him. Constable told Fisher in May 1830, ‘John is much esteemed, for his integrity & skill – & what avails him more than either, he is not feared by them – his mildness disarms them of dread.’
John Dunthorne the younger. Self-portrait
By 1832 Johnny had his own studio/workshop in Grafton Street, off Fitzroy Square, not far from Charlotte Street. He was never a very original painter, but from 1829 to 1832 he exhibited at the Royal Academy and British Institution. Some of Constable’s works which he had copied formed the models for his own unassertive pictures – for example, an across-the-river view of Salisbury Cathedral and Archdeacon Fisher’s house in 1827, a work more detailed and less naturalistic than his master’s. Of course he painted Stour valley scenes: various fieldscapes, river and lock views, rainbows … Constable continued to promote Johnny’s social life, when he could. In August he took Johnny and his uncle Thomas Dunthorne who was in town to an evening party at the British Institution so that Johnny – who wasn’t well then – could ‘see the ladies and pictures by lamp light … altogether a pretty sight’.11
On 6 November 1831 Constable sat down with the big family Bible and entered on a flyleaf the names of all his children and the dates and times of their births. John Charles was just coming up to fourteen and Minna was twelve. In 1832 she had scarlet fever while at Miss Noble’s school and Constable was terrified. Mrs Roberts was tearfully distraught, not being there to look after her. Bulletins from Dr Evans or Mr Haines to Charlotte Street gave news of Minna’s temperature and pulse. The question was, would she live? But at last came a turn for the better: John Charles, who had been much alarmed for his sister, wrote from Well Walk to his father, ‘Miss Noble says that Miney has had a good night and is going on very well, we have sent her a potel of strawberys.’ Charles Golding, the second son, had good health but high energy and a short attention span. For the studious Boner he proved a somewhat disruptive pupil. Charles was sent to school in Folkestone, and the seaside and harbour there gave him a chance to expand his interest in boats. One of his first letters to Boner from Mr and Mrs Pierce’s establishment in Folkestone incorporated a sketch of a merchant ship, an ‘indiaman scudding along’.12
Constable, so long deprived of Academy rank, threw himself into the workings of the institution. In 1830 he attended five council meetings and general assemblies. He was on hand when Martin Archer Shee, Dublin-born portraitist and writer on art, was elected President in Lawrence’s place. In the spring he joined the Arrangement Committee for that year’s exhibition and this job as a ‘hangman’ meant putting up with criticism and requests for favours from colleagues, as well as – so he told Fisher – ‘some scurrilities in the newspapers, the mouths of which who can escape who has others to please’. It was a task requiring diplomatic skills which he lacked. Some pictures were inevitably more visible and better lit than others. Constable was bothered by the immense frames of one exhibitor, but the offending artist said his frames were no different from those Lawrence had used. Constable told him, ‘it is easy to imitate Lawrence in his frames.’ His own entries gave him difficulty. He wrote to Samuel Lane while working on one, ‘I am sadly harassed, and not being able to call on you is most vexatious. I cannot go out, lest my picture and my fire should go out too.’ His exhibition pictures were a Dell Scene at Helmingham; a view of Hampstead Heath with London in the Distance, perhaps made from the upstairs back windows of Well Walk, showing the dome of St Paul’s on the horizon and two donkeys in a dip in the foreground; and an unidentified ‘landscape’.
A fourth painting should have been hung but ran into trouble. (Constable as an Academician had the right to exhibit up to eight paintings.) It was a painting he had done while sitting by the river at the end of the Fishers’ Leydenhall garden some years before: a limpid, untroubled painting of the Wiltshire Avon, water meadows and a few pollarded willows on the far bank and reflections of the trees on the calm water surface moving slowly by. But this picture did not go forward with his other three as the work of Constable. Perhaps the porters made the mistake. Watermeadows at Salisbury got thrown in with the thousand or so works entered by non-members, and Constable listened while his fellow committee members discussed his picture. ‘A poor thi
ng,’ said one. ‘Very green,’ said another. ‘It’s devilish bad – cross it,’ said a third, meaning chalk-mark it for rejection. Abraham Cooper, who was on the Arrangement Committee, later told W.P. Frith that at that point Constable stepped forward from his seat and faced his fellow judges. He said that he had painted the offending picture. ‘I had a notion that some of you didn’t like my work, and this is pretty convincing proof. I’m very much obliged to you.’ Then, Cooper said, he made a low, ironic bow.13
Water meadows at Salisbury
Martin Archer Shee was upset and asked how the painting had got mixed up with the outsiders’ paintings. The committee members muttered their apologies, expressed their embarrassment, and there was quick agreement that Watermeadows be admitted. But Constable wouldn’t have this. He said, ‘It has been properly condemned as a daub. Send it out.’ He took it home with him under his arm. Some have suggested that this incident may have been contrived, either by RAs playing a joke on Constable, or by Constable himself, winding up his fellow members. But it seems more likely to have been pure mischance, a mistake by the carpenter who chalked the Xs or the porters who sorted and stacked the paintings. (Graham Reynolds notes that Constable told Fisher about a similar mistake the porters had made when they saw a cross on a frame and took it for the mark of rejection; but the cross turned out to have been made by the frame-maker. ‘So much for chance in these things[,] on which perhaps hung the peace & livelihood of some respectable artist.’) Constable didn’t hold this incident against the Academy; at the sale of Sir Thomas Lawrence’s effects in June 1830, he bought for twelve guineas the palette which had originally belonged to Sir Joshua Reynolds and which Sir George Beaumont had left to Lawrence – Constable presented the palette to the Academy. The Academy fixed a silver plaque on it, giving all the details of its provenance and mentioning that the palette and a handsome mahogany case had been presented by Mr Constable.14
Charles Leslie was among the early admirers of Constable’s ‘daub’; he told Richard Redgrave he would have given any of his own works for Watermeadows at Salisbury,15 which John Sheepshanks later gave to the South Kensington Museum, now the V&A. But Constable was certainly aware that, although he hadn’t agreed with the judgement of his fellow hanging judges in this case, his way of painting didn’t satisfy everyone. He admitted to Fisher in May 1830, ‘I have filled my head with certain notions of freshness – sparkle – brightness – till it has influenced my practice in no small degree, & is in fact taking the place of truth[;] so invidious is manner, in all things – it is a species of self worship – which should always be combated – & we have nature (another word for moral feeling) always in our reach to do it with – if we will have the resolution to look at her.’
16. English Landscape (1830–32)
THE LETTER TO Fisher of May 1830 went on to announce a Constable event. He told his old friend that he had a little book about to start coming out called Various Subjects of Landscape, characteristic of English Scenery; there would be four prints in each part, and it promised well. It was to be his summing-up. What it didn’t promise – although he didn’t know this yet – was an easy time for his health, finances and happiness.
English Landscape was a new experience for Constable, whose works had not been successfully reproduced at this point. It was a series of mezzotints, a form of engraving, invented in the seventeenth century, that became popular in the eighteenth when it was used to reproduce portraits painted by Gainsborough and Reynolds. The metal plate was chiselled into a blurred mesh of dots and this, when covered with ink, would produce a solid black printed image. The engraver then scraped off areas of the burr or burnished the plate smooth in the parts where he wanted half-tones and lights to create the picture he had in mind. The engraver Constable picked for his project was a twenty-seven-year-old craftsman named David Lucas.1 Lucas’s background was even more rural than Constable’s – his father was a working farmer and grazier in Northamptonshire – but Lucas had been apprenticed to a leading engraver, Samuel William Reynolds. Reynolds had begun, but not finished, an engraving of Constable’s Lock, of 1824, and he had also been asked by John Arrowsmith to make prints of some of Constable’s Brighton drawings – another abandoned project. Lucas was living on the Harrow Road, Paddington.2 Constable had written to him in August 1829 when sending – so it seems – sketches for proposed plates. As the letter to Fisher of May 1830 demonstrates, the project was properly under way by the following spring.
In 1822 Fisher had recommended that Constable build up his reputation by lithographs. Constable’s drawings always impressed people, Fisher said; therefore, ‘Get one done on stone as an experiment.’ Fisher wasn’t keen on mezzotint, whose stubbly process he thought unsuited to Constable’s ‘evanescent effects’ – ‘Your charm is colour, and the cool tint of English daylight.’ But his enthusiasm for the idea of Constable reproductions got to the artist. Fame of course was a spur, and other artists had found engraving a way of making a record of their works. Claude was the great inspiration, with his Liber Veritatis. Turner’s Liber Studiorum was a more up-to-date exemplar – and Constable must have recognised the value of the book of engravings as an advertising tool, useful in disseminating Turner’s work to a wider field. Constable could do with such an audience. Popularity, he kept claiming, was never going to be his, but this didn’t stop him hankering after acceptance by his peers and greater recognition as a landscape painter. Did he know Hazlitt’s essay ‘Immortality in Youth’? – ‘It is the simplicity and, as it were, abstractedness of our feelings in youth that (so to speak) identifies us with Nature and (our experience being weak and our passions strong) makes us fancy ourselves immortal like it.’3 In the introduction Constable wrote for his book of mezzotints, he set those artists who had eyes only for ‘what others have accomplished’ against those who went to the primitive source, Nature, and added to Art qualities of Nature unknown to it before. They ‘thus formed a style which was original’. The first type of artist merely repeated the work of others, and was easily comprehended and welcomed. But ‘the rise of an Artist in a sphere of his own must almost certainly be delayed; it is to time generally that the justness of his claims to a lasting reputation will be left’. He intended to display the variety of nature and show how the landscape of England looked at various seasons, at various times of day.4
The effort of bringing forth English Landscape strained both artist and engraver. Constable wrote to Lucas in March 1831:
I have thought much on my book, and all my reflections on the subject go to oppress me – its duration, its expence, its hopelessness of remuneration, all are unfavourable … The expence is too enormous for a work that has nothing but your beautiful feeling and execution to recommend it – the painter himself is totally unpopular and ever will be, on this side of the grave certainly … Remember dear Lucas that I mean not to think one reflection on you – every thing with the plan is my own – and I want to releive my mind of that which now harrasses it like a disease.
Nearly a year later Constable told Lucas:
I am so sadly grieved at the proof you now send me of the Castle [Hadleigh, that is] that I am most anxious to see you. Your art may have resources of which I know nothing – but so deplorably deficient in all feeling is the present state of the plate that I can suggest nothing at all – to me it is utterly, utterly HOPELESS.’5
Lucas found it hard to measure up to Constable’s standards. He thought Constable sometimes charged him with failures he didn’t deserve. He told the painter, ‘You seem to think I stick at nothing where my own interest is concerned, but I have made not a few sacrifices rather than act in a way that I anticipated would be disagreable [sic] to you.’ But compared with the maker of the Liber Studiorum, who did much of his own initial etching of the plates and then had frequent rows with his engravers, Constable was patient and friendly. Both he and Lucas were often unwell during this period. Both were made anxious by sick children. Constable was aware that he kept changing his mind
about which subjects to have engraved and how the prints should be composed, and he demanded reworkings from Lucas that were often counter-productive – the final states were much worse than the earliest.6
Yet despite all this Lucas found Constable a stalwart companion in their ‘joint labours’. Between giving directions and then changing directions for printing the sets, Constable frequently expressed concern for Lucas and his family. When Lucas’s little boy was very sick, Constable asked Dr Davis (who also attended Constable and his son John Charles) to visit the Lucases. On 4 January 1831 he sent Holland, the man who often carried messages for him, to find out from Lucas how things were with the boy: ‘I feel for your distress, and I trust you have seen Dr Davis – for if human means can avail they are his. Don’t think of me and my concern for a moment … I mention this only to releive your mind from all other anxiety, as I well know your great integrity, and that you are always too ready to devote yourself to others, or at least to me.’ Ultimately Constable gave Lucas his support when he tried for election as an Associate of the Academy and told him they had ‘a bond of friendship’ brought about by ‘the lovely amalgamation’ of their works. Lucas was to remember instances when Constable reminded him of their common rural backgrounds. On one occasion in July 1830 Constable made a sketch for him showing the way English river valleys ran to the sea and in particular ‘that which divides the counties of Essex and Suffolk’.7
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