John Constable

by Anthony Bailey

  After his unusual Suffolk holiday – ‘gone fossiling’ – Constable got some drawings and watercolours done while in Folkestone looking after John Charles. And he had been busy earlier in the year, preparing Englefield House for the Academy. He had worked on it through the winter with his usual peaks and troughs of morale. Despite his success with Wivenhoe Park, a happy resolution of the possibilities and pitfalls of the type, the genre was not for him. He had written loftily to Fisher, ‘A gentleman’s park is my aversion. It is not beauty because it is not nature.’ (Nowadays we are more tolerant, finding many a great estate a thing of beauty, a zone of cultivated landscape – possibly reminiscent of Constable’s Suffolk – amid hedgeless expanses run by agribusiness.) But Constable’s aversion hadn’t caused him to refuse de Beauvoir’s commission. The job seems to have come to him by way of Samuel Lane, Sir Thomas Lawrence’s former assistant, who had done a portrait of the mansion’s owner. Constable and Lane had visited the house near Reading in August 1832 and Constable sketched it. In mid-December, busy with the painting, he wrote to Leslie that he had made all the cows in the foreground bigger. ‘This has had all the effect you anticipated and sent the house back and also much enhanced & helped to realize my foreground, which indeed this blank canvas wants to aid it. But I must try at one of the elements – namely air – & if that include light, I ought not to despair.’ His brother Abram visiting London reacted with enthusiasm to the painting: ‘I think your House Picture will be beautiful, a faithful representative of “9 o’clock in the morning, in [summer]” ’.8

  Folkestone, 1833

  However, in late February he had to put up with the collector William Wells, who enjoyed telling Constable how much better he liked the work of other artists. On this occasion Wells looked over a number of Constable’s paintings. As Leslie learned:

  I sincerely beleive nothing amongst them made any impression upon him [n]or did they come into his rules, or whims, of the art. I told him, that I had perhaps other notions of the art than picture admirers in general – I looked on pictures as things to be avoided. Connoisseurs [such as Wells] looked on them as things to be imitated … and serve only to fill the world with abortions … Good God – what a sad thing it is that this lovely art – is so wrested to its own destruction – only used to blind our eyes and senses from seeing the sun shine, the feilds bloom, the trees blossom … – and old black rubbed-out dirty bits of canvas, to take the place of God’s own works.

  Constable said he wanted to see Leslie again. Like Jaques in As You Like It, he loved to cope with Leslie when he, Constable, was in one of his ‘sullen moods’.

  Towards the completion of the painting for de Beauvoir he cheered up. Even though the chimney pots were endless, he wrote to his son Charles that Englefield House – named after a ‘great battlefeild of the Danes’ – looked bright and cheerful, and that ‘all like it who see it’.9 One such admirer was the Countess of Morley, who visited Charlotte Street in early April and on seeing Englefield House declared, in words he might have picked himself, ‘How fresh – how dewy – how exhilarating!’10 A discordant voice was that of Mr Wells, making a second visit; he stayed two hours and this time was really annoying, not least because he had taken up the rival landscape painter F.R. Lee. Constable wrote to Leslie, ‘Mr Wells saw nothing in my house to approve – but much to disparage. I had “lost my way” – Turner was “quite gone” – lost and possessed by a yellow which he could not see himself, therefore could not avoid. Mr Wells looked not at any of my pictures – only by glances of contempt – but on seeing some of my studies, he kept saying, this would be of use to Lee – & this – & this might be of service to Lee – & so on.’ Wells sent Lee to Charlotte Street to ask about the prices of Constable’s studies – Wells would pay for them. Constable told Lee they would have to wait for the final sale, presumably on Constable’s death or bankruptcy. ‘This most kind and benevolent Mr Wells would gladly put the last shovel of earth on my coffin with his own hands.’

  The Arrangement Committee at the Academy had shovels or knives of their own. Reinagle was one of the three arrangers that year and Constable tried to get him to hang the House in a good spot, in a good light. In early April Constable told Boner that Reinagle ‘has made me quite easy about my picture and that all is going right in the great house [i.e. Somerset House] at this most selfish time of all, when cutting a man’s throat is considered really an act of kindness’.11 Indeed it was, and Reinagle and his associates, Briggs and Westall, put Englefield House in a place where, Constable thought, it was ‘quite destroyed’. Sir Martin Archer Shee rubbed in the salt by telling Constable it was ‘only a picture of a house, and ought to have been put in the Architectural Room’. Constable replied, echoing Abram, that it was ‘a picture of a summer morning, including a house’.12

  The reception by the press wasn’t too horrid. The Morning Chronicle’s writer was snippy as usual, saying that Englefield House – entered with six other smaller oil and watercolour landscapes by Constable – was merely topographical map-work. John Bull – in a review forwarded by Abram – exclaimed, ‘Constable is either laughing at the public or wishes to be laughed at himself.’ But the Morning Post was enthusiastic:

  We have seen nothing to compare with this from the hand of Mr Constable for a long time. There is so much freshness and truth and such a mass of bright but sober colour, that it is quite a gem in its way. Mr Constable has evidently forgotten to put on his last layer of whitewash … We hope he has lost the brush. The whole picture consists of an ancient castellated mansion on a lawn, with a thick shubbery behind.13

  Unfortunately, the person most concerned after the artist, the owner of the mansion, wasn’t among the painting’s admirers. Richard Benyon de Beauvoir thought the cattle in the foreground made it seem as if ‘he had his farm yard before his Drawing Room windows’. Could Constable please replace the cattle with deer? Mr de Beauvoir wanted the house – his house – which was of Elizabethan origin, to be the object of attention. And he complained to Samuel Lane of the ‘specky or spotty appearance’ of Constable’s painting. In an early sketch Constable had put deer, not cows, and he had no objection to replacing the cattle in that way. But even with deer in place de Beauvoir still didn’t like the picture, and it was another year before he paid the hundred guineas due to the artist. He also rejected Constable’s offer to try again and to ‘enter minutely into its elegant detail’. De Beauvoir eventually gave the offending painting to a nephew. At this point it is possible to side in part with the viewers who found Englefield House wanting. It has a detailed deadness or ghostly blankness; the air and light Constable hoped for were better suggested in one of his preparatory watercolour sketches made the previous August. As Constable had noted, the windows and chimneys were innumerable and he couldn’t get round the fact. It was not a Wivenhoe Park or Malvern Hall where acquaintanceship made for attachment. Thereafter his aversion to gentlemen’s parks was fully maintained. Some of his smaller but more personally connected entries at Somerset House – a heath, a windmill, a landscape at sunset and one called A Cottage in a Cornfield – better presented his strengths.14

  He found time for small and often happier jobs. He coloured in ‘all the little pictures in Dr Watt’s Hymn Book for dear Emily’.15 He oversaw the making of a new title page and introduction for English Landscape. He gave a talk at the Hampstead Assembly Room and did illustrations for an edition of Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. He also spent a night at Lady Dysart’s, sent twenty-eight bottles of port to Abram and Mary for Christmas, and shipped via cousin Sidey’s vessel a quantity of blankets for the needy of East Bergholt. At a meeting of the AGBI he took up the miserable situation of one Russell Sharp, ‘hard up’.16

  In June 1833 he had had a blow to his pride worse than de Beauvoir’s rejection. An oil by him of Helmingham Dell was knocked down at Christie’s for two pounds ten shillings. The picture had belonged to James Pulham, had been bought back after his death by the artist, and then r
ecently sold to a collector named Robert Ludgate. Ludgate died in turn while the picture was on show at the British Institution and his widow swiftly and naively put it and other pictures up for auction with no reserve price. But the Dell arrived late for the Christie’s sale and failed to get listed in the printed catalogue – this put off many dealers and potential buyers. Some thought it couldn’t be a real Constable. On its sale to Charles Scovell for a mere fifty shillings, Edward Dubois, the Morning Chronicle’s hatchet man, said this indicated the proper value of Constable’s works. An aggrieved Constable asked various friends and the solicitor Anthony Spedding whether he should sue the Chronicle. Spedding advised taking no action. Mr Christie said it was all unintentional – he had thought he was knocking it down and thus saving it for the vendor’s widow – and Mrs Ludgate claimed she had been talked into the hasty sale by a friend, Major Chapman, who had apparently profited by securing the Ludgate collection for little money; she now called Chapman ‘base’. Constable in Hampstead wrote to Boner about the ‘villany’ of Dubois: ‘What can such a man be but an assassin, to destroy character, livelihood, & every thing else, & let himself out for hire to write against everything good, for pay.’ After 1834, Dubois’ venom was dropped from the Chronicle, though he was absent from the Observer, too, in 1836 and 1837.17

  The number of Constable’s old friends lost to death had increased again. In early March 1833 his early mentor J.T. ‘Museum’ Smith, whom Constable had first met in 1796, had died – inflammation of the lungs was given as the cause.18 Towards the end Smith was in ‘great debt and poverty’ and borrowed thirty pounds from Constable.19 Constable made one attempt to get repaid but soon relented. Smith told Constable he would never regret his goodness to one he had known so long,20 and Constable wrote to Leslie on Smith’s death, ‘How glad I am at the result of my conduct to him (for I did not know it, but he was then dying) now that he has reached that bourne whence no traveller returns.’ Constable sent five guineas to Smith’s widow, who had been left without a shilling, but he asked Leslie not to mention it. Leslie noted that although Constable didn’t have a large circle of friends, he had a few who were very good friends indeed. Those who got to know him liked him very much. And his best friends took a lot out of him. After a time-consuming ten-day visit from Fisher in 1824, Constable wrote to Maria, ‘I am almost glad Fisher is out of town.’

  Now he was threatened with the departure of his closest remaining friend. Leslie, born in London but an American by parentage and upbringing, was offered a part-time job teaching art at the United States Military Academy at West Point, on the Hudson River in New York State. A house, a steady income, a healthy situation, good prospects for his children, a studio – all the advantages were paraded, and Leslie’s American relatives pressed him to accept. Constable was dismayed. He wrote to Leslie on 11 June 1833 (his own birthday and possibly a day for weighing up his own career), ‘The loss of you is a cloud casting a shade over my life, now in its autumn …’ In mid-August, when Leslie and his family were getting ready to sail, Constable wrote from Well Walk: ‘The thoughts that I am to be deprived of [the] society, at least of the happy hours of your and Mrs. Leslie’s several interviews, of our communications on art, and on many things else – weigh very heavily on my heart – so much so as to depress my mind, and prevent the enjoyment of even the little that remains of your countenance to me.’ But the letter continued with a sudden enthusiastic exclamation: ‘What beautiful silvery clouds are rolling about today!!!’

  The Leslies sailed in September, taking two presents from Constable, a watercolour of a windmill near Colchester and – specifically for Harriet Jane Leslie, Constable’s god-daughter – a copy of Isaac Watts’s Divine Songs illustrated with woodcuts by Stothard that Constable had hand-coloured. Constable sent to the Athenaeum an unsigned and somewhat obituarial note about Leslie’s departure, mentioning Leslie’s liking for English art, ‘including the works of Chantrey, of Wilkie, of Turner, the native freshness of the landscapes of Constable, and the grace and freshness of the portrait composition of Chalon …’21 (Too much freshness, perhaps, but the puff for Chalon redressed the puff for himself.) When Constable in Hampstead next wrote to Leslie (in West Point), in January 1834, he said, ‘I have been sadly ill since you left England, and my mind so depressed that I have been scarcely able to do any one thing – in that state I did not like to write to you … I wish enough I had been with you, never more to set foot on old England again … I find it hard to touch a pencil now that you are not here to see [it].’ From one who had so far never let England out of his sight, the suggestion that he wanted never to set foot in it again was serious stuff, but probably expressed only his mood of the moment. In fact, according to Lucas, Constable predicted that Leslie would soon come back. This proved correct. Leslie found his new quarters at West Point a tight fit. He was expected to help with his students’ examinations and this cut into his time for painting. Everything cost more than he had been led to believe it would. His wife wasn’t well. And so in mid-April he and his family sailed again for England on the Philadelphia, the ship commanded by Captain Elisha Morgan, the Yankee skipper who became a friend of Dickens and Turner and other artists.22 A new house for the Leslies was found off the Edgware Road, on the edge of town, and there Constable was happily reunited with them, and visited often. Leslie’s son Robert recalled an occasion when Constable and his father had sat in the front room, sipping tea, and admiring a sunset beyond a fine row of oaks and elms, after which they spent the rest of the evening talking over pictures in Leslie’s painting room.23 Leslie regretted the time it had taken for him to get to know Constable, to understand ‘his worth as a man, or his true value as an artist’.24

  While Leslie was in the States, Constable’s social circle was constricted. As he got older and life seemed to accelerate, friends dropped away. One such colleague, John Jackson, had died in 1831 – a fellow RA student, a protegé of Sir George Beaumont, a fine portrait painter, and a man Constable regarded as having ‘no enemy’. (Jackson was coming home in a coach from a dinner party and gave up his inside seat to a lady; he caught a chill and never recovered.)25 There was still Stothard, but the book illustrator (and butterfly collector) was now seventy-eight (in 1833) and in failing health. He had voted – without being lobbied – for Constable’s election to the Academy. On one sultry day, according to David Lucas, when Stothard and Constable were sitting ‘in the shadow of a tree of rich foliage, Stothard looking up through the branches to the clear blue sky remarked … “You see, Constable, it’s all glazing, glazing”.’26 Stothard had given useful advice for improving Waterloo Bridge and had called to see Constable when he was ill. His deafness was less of a handicap when he was with a companion, but he was on his own in the autumn of 1832, out walking, when he apparently didn’t hear a carriage approaching and was knocked down. There was no visible injury, but Stothard never fully recovered. Constable repaid past kindness and sometimes called to see Stothard. In April 1833 he wrote to George Constable that he had just spent an hour or two with Stothard: ‘Poor man! The only Elysium he has in this world is found in his own enchanting works. His daughter does all in her power to make him happy and comfortable.’27 Stothard died on 27 April 1834.

  One other old acquaintance had fallen away. Benjamin Haydon, ten years Constable’s junior, had got to know him at the Academy Life School. Even pricklier than Constable, Haydon had dreams of glory as a historical painter. For a while he was taken up by Sir George Beaumont, whose patronage could be mercurial. But Haydon’s flamboyant dedication to ‘high art’ and his bumptiousness caused trouble. In 1808 Constable had told Farington that Haydon ‘is possessed with a notion that the eyes of the world are upon himself’.28 His patrons vanished. The Royal Academy declined to elect him and was savagely condemned. He remained friends with Wilkie, however, and in 1828 expressed admiration for Constable’s use of colour in his Dedham Vale, on show at the chief den of iniquity, Somerset House.29 In April 1832 Wilkie told Haydon he ha
d just run into Constable who had recalled dining with them in Slaughter’s Coffee House on St Martin’s Lane twenty-six years before. Haydon recorded this in his journal, which now seems to have a better claim to immortality than his stagy, bombastic paintings.

  Wilkie – wide-eyed, startled-looking – went on being a good friend of Constable’s. After Maria’s death, Wilkie’s house in Lower Phillimore Street was one where Constable first came out of his seclusion. Artists were often neighbours, as in Charlotte Street, and frequently landlords or tenants of one another. Leslie had rooms in Charlotte Street for a while, and when he moved to Lisson Grove it was to the house of the sculptor J.C.F. Rossi, in which Haydon had rented a studio before his bankruptcy. Artists also modelled for each other: Haydon donned a monk’s robes for a Wilkie painting and Constable at least twice posed as a doctor for Wilkie, in 1809 for his Sick Lady visited by her Physician, and in 1834 for the physician in Columbus.30 With Constable, friendship took precedence over what he thought of his friends’ art. Wilkie’s literary sort of painting would not have seemed a natural thing for the landscape painter to like, but he stood by Wilkie even as his early fame diminished and the effect of studying old masters abroad altered his style.31 In April 1833 Wilkie was at work on a full-length portrait of William IV in military uniform, and Constable wrote to Leslie that Wilkie ‘is too fond of rancid old art, but his soul saves it all – so grand & fine’.

  Jack Bannister still came to dinner from time to time; the actor was delighted with the print recently made of Leslie’s painting of the Tristram Shandy characters, Uncle Toby and the Widow Wadman – Bannister had modelled for Uncle Toby.32 And John Linnell, Hampstead neighbour, who was, like Constable, a landscapist and portrait painter, was frequently encountered in the village or going to and from London by coach. Relations had been edgy between them. Linnell was, as noted, a Baptist, and Constable tended to take against Dissenters. Linnell had blamed Constable for spreading stories about Linnell’s antagonism to the Salisbury drawing master David Read in the early 1820s; Linnell had thought this gossip had scuppered his chances of being elected to the Royal Academy. (Despite his talent, he never was, though he went on exhibiting there.)33 His religious beliefs and ostentatiously shabby dress were also held against him, but as far as Linnell was concerned, the blame for his rejection belonged to Constable. Some, like Linnell’s biographer A.T. Story, thought Constable was jealous of his ‘young competitor’ and – soured by the long time he himself had waited to be recognised, ‘with lesser men preferred before him’ – didn’t tolerate his rivals. William Collins had been drawn into the argument and for a long time ceased to be a friend of Constable’s. After Constable’s election to the Academy in 1829, Collins declared that the value of his own diploma had gone down by 50 per cent. The following year Constable told William Carpenter, Collins’s brother-in-law, ‘I despise no man but Collins.’ In fact, he admired Collins’s skill but thought his work sentimental. With Linnell matters slowly mended. Linnell had befriended old William Blake and seems to have introduced Blake to Constable. Anyone wanting to make friends with him had to persevere.34