John Constable

by Anthony Bailey

  … while, as if in sign

  Of danger past, a glittering robe of joy,

  Set off abundant by the yellow ray,

  Invests the fields, and nature smiles reviv’d.

  The rainbow gives the impression that Constable was coming out from the storm he’d been in since Maria’s death.9

  Constable was on the Arrangement Committee again and in May found his hanging skills and honesty attacked in the Observer. Edward Dubois suggested that he had deliberately put the pictures of some of his landscape rivals in bad positions. Dubois allowed that Constable had few equals in depicting the scene before him ‘with all its freshness and truth’, before complaining that all his worst peculiarities were ‘monstered’ in his Salisbury Cathedral: ‘coarseness and vulgarity are the marked characteristics of Mr C.’. ‘The Great Salisbury’, as Constable called it in a letter to Leslie, was hung close to Turner’s Caligula’s Palace and Bridge, and Turner was among those annoyed by Constable’s hanging arrangements. David Roberts, a young admirer of Turner, heard his hero sounding off at a party one evening about Constable’s perfidy in moving Turner’s picture to the benefit of his own. Despite Turner’s sense of grievance, the Morning Chronicle thought the Cathedral showed his influence and Constable came out worse from the comparison. ‘It is impossible to class among landscapes of the first order Mr Constable’s coarse, vulgar imitation of Mr. Turner’s freaks and follies.’ Constable, thought the Chronicle’s critic (once again – as one might have guessed – Edward Dubois), had been painting with his toes. Both painters had been subject to jokes about their soapsuds and snowflakes and this continued, with The Times finding that the Salisbury – ‘a very vigorous and masterly landscape’ – had been spoiled by ‘somebody’ who had put in ‘such clouds as no human being ever saw, and by spotting the foreground all over with whitewash. It is quite impossible that this offence can have been committed with the consent of the artist.’ Yet the Morning Post and the Literary Gazette found the proximity of Turner and Constable a reason for compliments. The latter’s critic was made to think of fire and water. ‘If Mr Turner and Mr Constable were professors of geology, instead of painting, the first would certainly be a Plutonist, the second a Neptunist. Exaggerated, however, as both these works are – the one all heat, the other all humidity – who will deny that they both exhibit, each in its own way, some of the highest qualities of art?’10

  Constable’s palette knife had been strenuously employed on the Salisbury Cathedral, though after the Academy exhibition he went on reworking it with brushes only. In parts the painting was thick with impasto. Constable believed that in the future it would be considered his greatest picture, conveying what Leslie called ‘the fullest impression of the compass of his art’.11 A viewer in the early twenty-first century can cavil with that judgement. Forceful, yes; stormy, indeed; but the painting’s intensity is dearly bought – other epithets that come to mind are mannered and rhetorical. An English El Greco? The late Bishop of Salisbury would have been more alarmed than ever by Constable’s storm clouds. As a piece of painting it had wonderful parts but as a complete work it failed. No one bought the painting during his lifetime and this gave him the unchallenged opportunity to go on fretting about it.

  Constable’s health improved with summer. At the end of June 1831 he took the three girls to Dedham to stay with Martha Whalley and her family. Isabel cleverly brought along a kitten from Hampstead, hiding it in her bonnet. Constable himself lodged with Abram and Mary at Flatford for five days and then for another week in August; coming back from the first visit he wrote to Leslie, ‘Nothing can exceed the beauty of the country – it makes pictures seem sad trumpery, even those that possess most of nature.’ He had a chance to make some sketches, including one of a brown-and-white springer spaniel peering at a vole from a river bank. In early August the Ipswich Journal published an obituary by Constable of a farmworker from nearby Much Wenham, Thomas Chiverton. Chiverton left a widow and nine children. Although he was only a ‘humble … day labourer’, Constable wrote, Chiverton had ‘a most extraordinary voice, one of the fullest, richest, and sweetest counter tenors ever perhaps heard’. He sang with the choirs of village churches and was acclaimed in that part of Suffolk. ‘He was gentle and affectionate to his family’, who were now bereft and lacking support. However, the locality rallied round and an appeal for funds to help Chiverton’s family was successful.12

  A dog hunting a water vole

  Back in town, the gift of half a buck from Lady Dysart provided the main dish for a dinner Constable gave in August, as if he were celebrating being out from under the cloud; his distinguished colleagues Martin Archer Shee and Henry Howard were there, along with Charles Eastlake and Charles Leslie, and Jack Bannister the actor. Writing to Leslie to tell him when Lady Dysart’s ‘haunch will be in perfection’, Constable said he had bought a small drawing from John Varley. Varley had forthrightly told him ‘how to do landscape’, and kindly pointed out Constable’s defects to him. When it came to naming a price for the drawing, Varley said, ‘It would usually be a guinea and a half, but only a guinea for an artist.’ Constable insisted on giving the larger sum, as Varley had made it clear to him that he was no artist.

  George IV had died, and England was changing, sooner and faster than Constable might have liked. As one of the forty full Academicians, he was invited to the coronation of the new King. Constable was proud to be at the ceremony in Westminster Abbey, eleven hours long, to see with his own eyes ‘the Crown of England put on the head of that good man, William IV – and that too in the chair of a saint’. He sketched for Leslie (who didn’t attend) the Lord Chancellor, Lord Brougham, who had defended George IV’s put-aside wife Caroline and further incurred Constable’s animosity by favouring the reform-minded Whigs. Constable sketched him from the back, with his coronet perched like a tea cosy on top of an enormous wig, looking ridiculously like a Jack-in-the-green. Constable sat in the south transept commanding a view of the nobility: ‘The moment the King’s crown was on, they all crowned themselves. At the same instant the shouts of “God save the King,” the trumpets, the band, the drums of the soldiers in the nave, and last – though not least – the artillery … made it all eminently imposing. The white ermine of the peers looked lovely in the sun … the tone of the walls was sublime – they were heightened, no doubt, by the trappings, like an old picture with a newly gilt frame.’

  This upbeat moment was unfortunately short. In October he was ill and very depressed again. Things seemed particularly black because he thought the country was going to the dogs. The Duke of Wellington’s government had been replaced by Whigs, bent on electoral reform. The new King was no longer that ‘good man’ but a reformer, Constable feared, and a great fool. Constable was worried that the Bicknell inheritance, needed for his children’s future, would be snatched from him by radicals. He wrote to Leslie towards the end of October, ‘What makes me dread this tremendous attack on the constitution of this country is, that the wisest and best of the Lords are seriously and firmly objecting to it – and it goes to give the government into the hands of the rabble and dregs of the people, and the devil’s agents on earth, the agitators.’ His illness kept him in Hampstead, and possibly the distance from his painting room in Charlotte Street magnified every problem; every difficulty was seen as an evil, every uncertainty as a calamity sure to happen. Constable’s Tory tendencies were stirred to a boil by the movement for parliamentary reform. He was able to draw and paint Old Sarum (one of his subjects in English Landscape), enjoying it as a historic site and dramatic feature for a painting, while recognising that it was ‘no continuing city’ and without acknowledging that it was one of the most flagrant of rotten boroughs.

  Constable’s conservatism was rooted in Suffolk soil and family ties. It was part of his inheritance. He resisted change that might overturn the established order. It was a structure of things that included the family mills, the cornfields off Fen Lane, and Dedham church in the distance. Now the on
ce unchanging plod of farming life was being shaken – there were new ways of tilling the soil, new machines for harvesting crops, new causes of unease and agitation. In protest at mechanisation, ricks were being burned in Suffolk as elsewhere. At one point both the rector – Dr Rhudde’s successor – and the squire fled East Bergholt, fearing insurrection. Yet with Constable a hint of better health and a better outlook ran together. In early November he felt more fit and wrote to Leslie saying the Reform Bill now gave him ‘not the least concern – I care nothing about it – & have no curiosity to know if it be dead or alive’. Among other things, the reformers got rid of the restrictions on killing, buying or selling game, and this pleased the rural poor. Trade unions were now legal. Although Peel’s new police force kept Radical mobs from tearing London apart during the agitation for the bill, the pro-Reform crowds were incensed by the opposition of the spiritual peers to the bill in the House of Lords, and managed to stone the bishops’ coaches and set fire to some of their palaces.13 ‘Disheartening times’ indeed, as Fisher had complained the year before, but in 1831 the two friends found fewer occasions to grumble together. Constable’s conservatism was in any event nonpartisan – he called for a plague on all political bodies. In 1836 he remarked to his unrelated namesake George Constable, a brewer in Arundel, Sussex: ‘I hate the Whigs, but the Tories have done the greatest mischeif, for it was they who passed the Catholic bill [emancipating Catholics from certain civil disabilities] – but I hate politics and never see a newspaper …’14

  Constable meant to gather his family at Charlotte Street for Christmas but in the end Well Walk was favoured. Minna dressed the drawing-room mantelpiece with festive greenery and then, before going to Putney for a week to visit her aunt Louisa, set up a little table with decorations in the dining room to make things look pretty for her father while she was away. He missed her exceedingly. And the new year saw a severe relapse in his health. He was disabled by rheumatism, perhaps by rheumatic fever. His right hand, with which he painted, still functioned, but his left arm was useless and he couldn’t work. Fourteen leeches were applied to his left shoulder to ease the pain, but this moved to his knee and he was unable to stand. He had to tell the Academy that he couldn’t be a Visitor at the Life School this season. Etty stood in for him and enjoyed arranging the female models for a tableau of Venus Sacrificing to the Graces. Shee, the RA President, wrote to say he was dismayed by Constable’s illness.

  Constable dictated to John Charles his correspondence to Lucas and Leslie.15 The latter was staying at Petworth House and had tried to buck up Constable with an account of Lord Egremont’s great collection. Constable responded, after several weeks of pain, to say he could now hold a pen again; he recalled some of Turner’s early works, which included ‘one of singular intricacy and beauty; it was a canal with numerous boats making thousands of beautifull shapes, and I think the most complete work of genius I ever saw’. And he went on, ‘Your mention of a “solemn twilight” by Gainsborough has awakened all my sympathy. Do pray make me a sketch of it, if it is ever so slight a splash. As to meeting you in these grand scenes, dear Leslie, remember the great were not made for me, nor I for the great, yet, perhaps, things are better as they are. My limited and abstracted art is to be found under every hedge, and in every lane, and therefore nobody thinks it worth picking up, but I have my admirers, each of whom I consider a host.’

  Constable was brought from Hampstead to recuperate in Charlotte Street. Johnny Dunthorne kept Martha Whalley informed about her brother’s condition, and Abram came to town to talk about family matters; this cheered the invalid considerably. Abram, a lifelong bachelor, was a diligent uncle to the Constable children, as well as the indispensable administrator of the Constable grain-and-coal business. After his visit, Constable’s doctor was impressed by the way Constable had perked up. Charles Leslie also heard frequently from Constable as he regained his strength. Constable wrote to him from his bed on 17 January: ‘How heavenly it is to wake up as I do now after a good night – and see all these dear infants about my bed all up early to know how papa passed the night.’ Constable claimed he was looking on the bright side of his illness and – like Robert Burton and John Milton – finding delights in melancholy. Constable’s ups and downs were closely monitored by Leslie, who recognised Constable’s ability to give in totally to his own feelings. ‘He said of himself, “If I were bound with chains I should break them, and with a single hair round me I should feel uncomfortable.” ’ At one point the Leslie family got the impression that Constable in his bereaved state wanted a feminine companion, and Leslie’s sister Ann, also an artist, was thought to be in line for the role.16 But though she copied Constable’s early Church Porch, which he lent her, visited Charlotte Street on several occasions with her brother and his wife, and often figured in Constable’s invitations to dine with him and his children, nothing came of the putative attachment. The Leslies, however, went on providing close support, and vice versa. Constable felt able to tell Charles Leslie just after his wife Harriet gave birth to their third son, George: ‘Don’t let her nurse too long – nothing undermines a constitution so insidiously.’17

  In early February Constable got to a meeting at Somerset House again and felt proud of the Academy. He worked himself back into his painting routine and told Lucas he was ‘dashing away at the great London’ – his Waterloo Bridge, his ‘Harlequin’s Jacket’, his ‘Lord Mayor’s show’. He had been wrestling with the idea on and off since 1817 (though his first reference to a large canvas on the subject was in a letter to Fisher of 1 September 1820). In early March his knees were still so badly affected he couldn’t manage the journey to Leslie’s house. At the beginning of April he told Leslie that he was ‘in a dreadfull state’ about his picture, but his five-year-old son Alfred liked to ‘help’ by playing alongside his easel, sometimes creating mischief the doting father found delightful. His venerable and generally admiring friend Thomas Stothard called on 24 April to look at the Waterloo and said, like Dickens’s Mr Jingle, ‘Very unfinished, sir – much to do – figures not made out, sir.’ The painting was finally called Whitehall Stairs, June 18th 1817, after the place on the river bank where the Prince Regent descended the stone steps and embarked for the bridge-opening ceremony. It was hung by the arrangers in the School of Painting, one of the smaller exhibition rooms. There, its creator thought, it could only be seen properly by visitors as they came through the doors; moreover the light was ‘of the worst kind for my unfortunate “manner” ’. He told Leslie he regretted sending in such a ‘scrambling affair’. Constable had hoped to make the picture ‘more finished’ on the spot, but this was thwarted when the varnishing days, on which members could go on working on the field of battle, were reduced in number that year.

  Constable was aware that the reduction in ‘varnishing’ time was directed mainly at Turner, the great competitor, who often turned what looked like a barely begun canvas into a recognisable painting on these occasions. This time a Turner painting, Helvoetsluys, hung next to the Constable river scene. Leslie recalled that Turner’s was

  a sea-piece … a grey picture, beautiful and true, with no positive colour in any part of it. Constable’s ‘Waterloo’ seemed as if painted with liquid gold and silver, and Turner came several times into the room while he was heightening with vermilion and lake the decorations and flags of the city barges. Turner stood behind him, looking from the ‘Waterloo’ to his own picture, and at last brought his palette from the great room where he was touching another picture, and putting a round daub of red lead, somewhat bigger than a shilling, on his grey sea, went away without saying a word.

  The intensity of the red lead, made more vivid by the coolness of the picture, caused even the vermilion and lake of Constable to look weak. I came into the room just as Turner left it. ‘He has been here,’ said Constable, ‘and fired a gun.’

  Turner did not enter the School of Painting again for a day and a half. ‘And then,’ said Leslie, ‘in the last moments that
were allowed for painting, he glazed the scarlet seal he had put on his picture, and shaped it into a buoy.’18

  Constable’s riverscape was the only picture he painted of the heart of London. He had used sketches for it that went back to the opening ceremony in 1817 and to visits to Lord Pembroke’s terrace near the stairs he had made in July 1826, when he was seeking a better viewpoint for the painting. Whitehall Stairs showed John Rennie’s new bridge as a pearly-grey structure of many spans, running in a straight line across the left side of the painting. The dome of St Paul’s was a mere pimple in the distance downstream. Constable’s final workings on the picture aimed to reproduce the sparkle on the river’s surface. To achieve this his instrument of choice was a palette knife: thick blobs of white paint were plastered on to the canvas. Perhaps his crippling rheumatism made him favour the knife rather than the brush, as well as his desire for certain effects. Whatever, his methods aroused the wrath of some critics – several of whom also failed to get the significance of the title and date, an event fifteen years in the past. The Morning Chronicle’s Edward Dubois (who mistook the occasion for the more recent opening of the new London Bridge) thought the artist/plasterer ‘might have been better employed in the erection of the bridge itself than in painting the subject’. However, the Morning Post got the picture: the right bridge, the right day, the right monarch. The paper noted the controversy over Constable’s manner but sided with those who admired the painting and upheld it as ‘a work of consummate skill’. Whitehall Stairs needed to be seen at a proper distance, the Post’s writer thought, not always easy in the crowded rooms of the Academy.19 But even Turner’s and Stanfield’s productions shrank by comparison to it. Later critics have been puzzled by the weird balustrade in the foreground and the children beyond it suspended seemingly in the air. Charles Leslie, faithful friend, found his enthusiasm fully tested: he thought that in pursuit of ‘the indispensable quality’ of chiaroscuro, ‘and of that brightness in nature which baffles all the ordinary processes of painting, and which it is hardly possible to unite with smoothness of surface’, Constable had been led into ‘a peculiar mode of execution’, and had here ‘indulged in the vagaries of the palette knife … to an excess’. Constable admitted to Leslie his restlessness about the picture – ‘it has not my redeeming voice, “the rural” ’. This lack of confidence may have led him to send in eight pictures in all, the most he had submitted since 1815; four were watercolours of rural subjects.20