John Constable

by Anthony Bailey

  By 1831 Linnell and Constable were on good terms again. Linnell sent Constable an engraved portrait of Robert Gooch, Maria’s gynaecologist, who had died the year before, and Constable was grateful. A few years later Constable bought several of the early parts of Linnell’s work, Michael Angelo’s Frescoes in the Sistine Chapel (1833–7) and suggested to Linnell an exchange of a copy of English Landscape for the remaining parts.35 As for Collins, he too eventually softened. Leslie wrote to him after Constable’s death asking for any thoughts he had about the departed, and Collins replied, tactfully if ponderously, ‘The charm of our lamented friend’s conversation upon art, was not only its originality, but its real worth, and the evidence it afforded of his heart-love of his pursuit, independent of any worldly advantages to be obtained by it.’

  More handicapped and less talented than Stothard, Samuel Lane was a frequent visitor to Charlotte Street. He lived not far away in Greek Street and often came with problems that he hoped Constable would solve. He may have hoped that his efforts to promote the Englefield House commission would be a form of repayment. But what Lane wanted most, to be made at least an Associate of the Academy, proved beyond Constable’s powers. Farington, Lane’s early supporter, might eventually have managed it, but he had now been dead for twelve years. If communicating with Lane using sign language took patience, so did dealing with Lane’s many grievances and his recourse to the wine bottle to relieve them. Constable sometimes went over to Greek Street late in the evening to answer one of the cris de coeur and found Lane stupefied. Nevertheless he went on trying to help. He let Lane know when he was going to be out of town and when he had returned from, say, East Bergholt.36 Lane seems to have called at Charlotte Street in October 1833 hoping that Constable would support him in the November elections for the Academy, but Boner told him truthfully that Constable was in Folkestone visiting John and Charles. When Constable heard from Boner about Lane’s visit, he replied to Boner: ‘I have written to poor Lane to sooth him if possible about the Academy. I wish for his sake it was at the bottom of the sea I am beholding so magnificently displayed and that these noble breakers would wash it from his mind.’37 Constable must have felt on occasion that the Academy, like many a club, was better belonged to and ignored than kept out of and annoyed by. But Lane didn’t have that privilege.

  One friend came late on the scene: the brewer and amateur painter George Constable. He was sixteen years younger than the artist who shared his surname and he had come across the English Landscape mezzotints while up in London in December 1832, staying coincidentally at 58 Charlotte Street. George Constable pleased John Constable by buying the most expensive prints of the engravings at a time when the latter felt gravely out of pocket from the venture. Soon, despite an arm injured after he was thrown from his gig, George was urging John to visit him in Sussex. He wanted to acquire one of his versions of Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s Grounds. And a week before Christmas 1833 he asked Constable, ‘Could you without much trouble enclose me a bit of your sparkling colour to copy?’ – a request that Constable’s heirs should have known about when a number of unknown ‘Constables’ later came on the market.38

  By 1834 Constable had become vice-president of the Artists’ Fund, the AGBI, and he went on being concerned with hard-up artists, their wives, widows and children. As noted, early the year before he had taken up the desperate case of Russell Sharp, whose wife had been ‘an actress of notoriety’. Constable continued to be interested in the condition of Mrs Theresa Hopkins, widow of the miniature painter John Hopkins, and carried small sums from the Fund to the house in Hampstead where she lay ill. He made a generous and apparently personal subscription to the orphaned children of a Mrs Hall in Grafton Street. Loans from him helped many he didn’t give directly to, though he complained to Leslie that some recipients – not only Museum Smith – took advantage of him; he was more annoyed by their deception than the loss of the money. He often got other benefactors involved in his good causes: ‘old Fontaine’, the needy Swiss organist, was assisted by donations via Constable from Lady Dysart and John Fisher. Fisher was told by Constable on one occasion that his ‘account’ with Constable had been debited five shillings to help save Fontaine from near starvation. Nor was East Bergholt neglected. Early in 1834 his sister Mary wrote from Flatford about Constable’s plan to send from London ‘winter comforts’ by way of cousin Sidey’s coasting vessel. She said she would be pleased to be Constable’s agent in seeing that old and needy villagers received the blankets he was sending.39

  19. Fever and Fire (1834)

  IN LATE DECEMBER 1833 Constable was again taken sick in Hampstead. Unable to leave Well Walk, he wrote in January to Leslie in America to say how ill and depressed he had been since Leslie departed from England. But worse was to come. He spent most of February and March in bed. His doctor, Herbert Evans, wrote to their mutual friend William Purton, one of several amateur painters Constable became friends with, to say it was a severe attack of rheumatic fever: ‘In the early part of this period the suffering was very great; all the joints became the seat of the diseases two or three times over, and the pain and fever were of the most aggravated kind. These sufferings he bore with great patience for one of so sensitive a frame.’ Constable generally cheered up when Evans made one of his twice-a-day visits. But Evans said, ‘I think he was never so well after this severe illness; its effects were felt by him, and showed themselves in his looks ever afterwards.’1

  There was a family history of this illness, too. Constable had had what he described to Leslie as an acute attack of rheumatism in December 1831 and his son John seems also to have had rheumatic fever during the 1833 Christmas holidays. Fortunately the devoted young Boner looked after Constable, ran errands, took dictation, and sat up all night in attendance.2 Rheumatic fever can affect not only the joints but the skin and central nervous system. It produces symptoms like arthritis: swollen joints, making the wrists, elbows, ankles and knees hot and painful. Nodules and protuberances may form, and rashes appear. Sometimes the muscles jerk involuntarily. Most seriously, the heart can be inflamed and damaged. In Constable’s case, painting was impossible, and for him this must have been as painful as the illness. His sister Mary had her own ideas for alleviating his symptoms: warm seabathing, avoiding cheese and very hot coffee, drinking camomile tea, walking in the sunshine and fretting at nothing.3

  When it came time for the Academy exhibition, he had only three watercolours and a pencil drawing to submit. The Spectator noted: ‘The exhibition is not rich in Landscape this year; which makes us miss Constable the more: he spoils better landscapes than many can paint.’4 One of the watercolours was Old Sarum from the south – very grey green and a sky frothing with rain clouds, with what looks like a downpour beginning on the right and, the motif he had used in Hadleigh Castle, a shepherd with his crook and a dog chivvying a flock of sheep along the sloping hillside; the giant mound, a seemingly inevitable shape, dominates the centre of the picture.5

  Old Sarum

  He was unable to go down to Suffolk for a promised spring visit or call in Colchester on the Masons, his cousin Anne and her husband, as he had intended. In June his spirits weren’t lifted when a Landscape with Figures of his was bought in at Christie’s at fifty guineas; at least Mr Christie ensured it wasn’t knocked down for fifty shillings.6 He was better enough to travel to Sussex in early July, joining young John at George Constable’s. His host won young John’s heart with the gift of ‘an electrifying machine’, whose arrival in Charlotte Street Constable dreaded. He was thinking about another big painting, ‘either a canal or a rural affair’, he told George Constable,7 and the fresh landscape of West Sussex was saluted in a letter to Leslie:

  The chalk cliffs afford John many fragments of oyster shells and other matters that fell from the table of Adam in all probability … The castle is the cheif ornament of this place – but all here sinks to insignificance in comparison with the woods, and hills. The woods hang from excessive steeps, and
precipices, and the trees are beyond everything beautifull: I never saw such beauty in natural landscape before. I wish it may influence what I may do in future, for I have too much preferred the picturesque to the beautiful – which will I hope account for the broken ruggedness of my style.

  If the southern ‘hangers’ were new to him, the succulent meadows along the Arun River were similar to those beside the Stour. Constable collected samples of the rich-coloured sand and soil of Fittleworth common to take back to Charlotte Street. He told George Constable he’d like bits of the slimy posts he’d seen near an old mill – would the brewer cut them off and send them to him?8

  He also visited Petworth House. Lord Egremont, the great collector, asked him to stay for a few days, and Constable said he would when Leslie was there. Looking at the art there, Constable came across a Gainsborough awaiting hanging. He wrote to Leslie, ‘I placed it as it suited me – & I now, even now think of it with tears in my eyes. No feeling of landscape ever equalled it. With particulars he had nothing to do, his object was to deliver a fine sentiment – & he has fully accomplished it.’ Leslie often spent part of the autumn with his family at the ‘house of art’, as Constable called it. After some dithering about the Earl’s invitation, Constable finally – encouraged by Leslie – took it up. As painter and patron John Constable and Lord Egremont might have been thought meant for each other. But Constable had earlier got into one of his awkward moods and decided that Lord Egremont wasn’t fond of landscape painting. In 1824 the Earl had seen some of Constable’s work being painted for Arrowsmith, and, Constable told Fisher, ‘He recollected all my pictures of any note, but he recollected them only for their defects … The truth is landscape affords him no interest whatever.’ (A comment that might have made Turner smile.) However, by 1834 the noble Lord’s generosity to artists – Turner and Leslie included – seems to have swayed Constable, and on 30 August he told a rather infirm Lady Dysart with some pride that he was going down to Petworth for a few days. Leslie, there already, continued to recommend the attractions of the house: ‘Today forty people dine here, most of them magistrates, and the house is as full as it can hold. Among them is the Duke of Richmond. I have just been looking at the table as it is set out in the Carved Room, covered with magnificent gold and silver plate.’

  Chantrey and Thomas Phillips, the portrait painter who was one of Lord Egremont’s favourites, were among the guests Constable found at Petworth. The Phillipses and Leslie took him to Cowdray Park to see the ruins of the castle, and Constable sketched.9 He stayed not ‘a few days’ but a fortnight. The hospitable Earl arranged for a carriage to be at Constable’s disposal for trips in the locality. Constable went with Leslie to sketch an old farmstead known as Wicked Hammond’s House. A woman living in the former home of the alleged villain told them that some bones had recently been found in the well that a local doctor said were ‘the arm bones of a Christian’. Leslie sketched the interior, Constable (as one might have expected) the outside, with its tall chimneys. Leslie observed his friend’s daily habits: ‘He rose early and had often made some beautiful sketch in the park before breakfast. On going into his room one morning … I found him setting some of these sketches with isinglass. His dressing table was covered with flowers, feathers of birds, and pieces of bark with lichens and mosses adhering to them, which he had brought home for the sake of their beautiful tints.’10

  Lord Egremont had also invited Turner, but the Earl told Constable that Turner was unable to come. ‘He was off to the North on a bookseller’s job, that was a profound secret.’11 Lord Egremont may have thought it would be instructive and amusing to throw the two landscape painters together, the celebrated and the less so, chalk and cheese. Or as Mary, one of Charles Leslie’s children, once noted in a handwritten so-called ‘lecture’, ‘The too [sic] most oposite modern painters, namely Constable and Turner, painted two metals much alike, Constable painted silver, Turner painted gold. That is the remark I heard pappa say when compareing a Constable with a Turner.’12

  Turner’s one-year seniority in birth (and twenty-seven-year seniority as an Academician) gave him plenty of scope he might have assumed anyway to act superior to Constable. Young Robert Leslie, then about eight, encountered Turner later that September at Petworth, presumably just back from his northern journey, down by the lake in the park – one of Turner’s favourite haunts. He had just caught a large pike. Robert had with him a toy sailing ship, a flat piece of board his father had cut out and which Constable had rigged for him with sticks for masts. When he heard the name Constable, Turner muttered crossly, ‘Oh, he don’t know anything about ships. This is how to do it.’ Tearing some pages from his sketchbook he made some paper sails for the craft that struck Robert as really shipshape. Constable was never the owner of his own sailing boat, the way Turner was, but from his life on the Stour, his knowledge of his father’s barges and coasting vessels, his voyage on the Coutts, and his observations from the beach at Brighton and Weymouth, he certainly knew about the sea and sailing vessels – pulled up on the shingle, rolling at anchor, or running before a Channel breeze. He drew or painted them as well as any man – except possibly the great competitor. (Turner, it may be noted, as if not to be outdone produced a Brighton Chain Pier a year after Constable’s.) Robert Leslie wrote later, ‘Though I think Constable never loved the sea, he was always at home with his pencil among shipping and boats. And I remember a simple but valuable lesson of his to me upon the first principle in drawing the hull of a man-of-war. “Always think of it,” he said, “and draw it first as a floating cask or barrel – and upon this foundation build up your ship, masts, and rigging.” As he said this, he rapidly evolved a stern view of a line of battleship upon the sketch of a half-immersed cask.’13

  During his Petworth stay Constable filled a large sketchbook with drawings, some highly finished. Two were pale watercolours, one of the great house from across the lake, the other of the rolling parkland and downs with Chanctonbury Ring in the eastern distance – fawn, light green, blues, barely coloured. How Constable got on with the motley company in what some referred to as ‘Liberty Hall’ – the Earl’s wife, mistresses, children, distinguished guests, and sundry artists and their families – is not known. The length of his stay suggests that he got over his pre-visit nerves and feelings of reluctance and awkwardness but was then glad to get home to his chicks. He never went to Petworth again. And Lord Egremont, already in old age, never bought a Constable painting.14

  Constable and Turner were both on hand in London on the evening of 16 October 1834 when the Houses of Parliament caught fire. They were among a number of Royal Academicians drawn to the spectacle. Wooden tallies once used as exchequer receipts were being burned in the furnaces of the House of Lords and the heat in the chimneys ignited structural timbers. A greater part of the medieval palace of Westminster was devoured by flames. Turner made sketches first from a boat on the river that he shared with Stanfield and some RA students, then from the Surrey bank opposite. Constable brought his two oldest sons in a hackney coach and got the driver to park it on Westminster Bridge so they could watch the inferno. Fire, heat and flame were very much in Turner’s line; the river, and river water used by the firemen for their pumps, more in Constable’s – and young John Charles as a youthful fire-engine enthusiast would have been excited. Soldiers were brought in to reinforce the police attempting to control the gawping crowds. The correspondent of the Gentleman’s Magazine noted that when the roof of the House of Lords fell in, the spectators ‘involuntarily (and from no bad feeling) clapped their hands’.15 Constable may have felt that divine intervention had struck the newly Reformed Parliament. Early the next year he wrote delightedly to his son Charles after attending the election in Suffolk for the House of Commons: ‘People are truly sick of the Whigs. The Tories are the best people, the Whigs next best – but as the Whigs always join the Radicals, we are not safe in their hands.’16 Two weeks after the fire, he described it to Charles Leslie. As he did so, Leslie said
later, ‘he drew with a pen, on half a sheet of letter paper, Westminster Hall as it showed itself during the conflagration; blotting the light and shade with ink, which he rubbed with his finger where he wished it to be lightest. He then, on another half sheet, added the towers of the Abbey and that of St Margaret’s Church – and the papers, being joined, form a very grand sketch of the whole scene.’ Inky fingers were an unavoidable by-product of art.17