John Constable

by Anthony Bailey

  In October 1835 he went to Worcester to deliver his ‘sermons’, this time three in number. He wrote to Lucas, ‘who would ever have thought of my turning Methodist preacher … but I shall do good, to the Art for which I live’. To his host in Worcester he expressed some reservations: ‘I feel myself in the situation of the lobster as very pleasant at first, but as the water got hotter and hotter, was sadly perplexed.’ But he later told Boner that he performed with éclat. He struck a personal note in his survey of landscape painting by mentioning his Suffolk origins and first job as a miller. He was annoyed by the Worcester Guardian’s report, which ‘mangled and mixed up’ his remarks, although ‘it was all well meant’.17 While in Worcester he went out to Bewdley to stay overnight at Spring Grove, the home of Maria’s half-sister Sarah, formerly Mrs Skey, who had married a clergyman. It was twenty-three years since he was there, wooing Maria.

  His third and last Hampstead lecture took place on 25 July 1836. He meandered around many loosely related topics, among them the effects of patronage, the bad habits of mannerists, how to draw from nature, the growth of trees and the contemplation of scenery. His illustrations for what he had to say about trees included a drawing of a tall and elegant ash which had stood near the road into Hampstead and according to Constable ‘died of a broken heart’, with a sign directed against vagrants attached to it by two long spikes ‘driven far into her side’. (For him the tree was feminine.) He quoted from two poets, Thomson and Milton, and declared:

  There has never been an age, however rude or uncultivated, in which the love of landscape has not in some way been manifested. And how could it be otherwise? For man is the sole intellectual inhabitant of one vast natural landscape. His nature is congenial with the elements of the planet itself, and he cannot but sympathize with its features, its various aspects, and its phenomena in all situations. We are no doubt placed in a paradise here if we choose to make it such …

  And towards the end: ‘We exist but in a Landscape and we are the creatures of a Landscape.’18

  Compared to Turner – whose last disjointed lecture at the Academy as Professor of Perspective had been given in 1828 – Constable seems a model of lucidity. He obviously put a lot into his talks. He borrowed pictures to use at them and got back from his cousin Jane Inglis a copy he had made from Claude. He borrowed books, such as Bryan’s Dictionary from William Carpenter in order to find out more about John Cozens. Samuel Rogers lent others to him. His painter’s library was increased for research purposes, though his authorities were not always impeccable, and as a stay-at-home artist unfamiliar with Continental collections he had to depend on prints of many old master paintings. Constable the lecturer was much more conventional than Constable the painter, his lecturing style somewhat stilted and ponderous. Although much in his discourses now sounds like received wisdom, a lot of it may have shocked his contemporaries, followers of the Taste and the portraitists and history painters who were the majority of RAs and the critics who applauded them. The wisdom only became received because of Constable and those who eventually saw things his way. He was overcritical of Boucher, whose landscape-as-fantasy didn’t appeal to this inhabitant of the natural landscape. But he ploughed his own memorable furrow. For example, ‘What were the habits of Claude and the Poussins? Though surrounded with palaces filled with pictures, they made the fields their chief places of study.’ And on Mannerists: ‘To this species of painting belong the works that have filled the intervals between the appearances of the great artists. They are productions of men who have lost sight of nature …’, men who were sometimes talented, sometimes feeble: Wouwerman, Berchem, Both, Vernet, Loutherbourg; Jacob More, Philipp Hackert … Ultimately, Constable declared:

  Manner is always seductive. It is more or less an imitation of what has been done already – therefore always plausible. It promises the short road, the near cut to present fame and emolument, by availing ourselves of the labours of others. It leads to almost immediate reputation, because it is the wonder of the ignorant world. It is always accompanied by certain blandishments, showy and plausible, and which catch the eye … As manner comes by degrees … all painters who would be really great should be perpetually on their guard against it. Nothing but a close and continual observance of nature can protect them from the danger of becoming mannerists.

  His sermon was perhaps intended not just for his audience but for himself.19

  21. A Portion of England (1835–37)

  THE YEAR BEGAN fine and remarkably illness free. Constable went up to Suffolk to see his brothers and sisters and to vote.1 He wrote enthusiastically to Boner that ‘the Blues’, the Tories, had been triumphant in that locality. Moreover, ‘The birds are singing, the rooks busy, the meadows green, & the water & skies blue.’ (A few months later he expressed via Boner his anti-Radical thanks to the Almighty for removing ‘the restless spirit, old Cobbett’.) Boner wrote back to East Bergholt on 19 January to give him the London news, to hope his Suffolk stay did him good, and to say, ‘We are all well.’2 While he was out of town John Dunthorne Senior called and talked to Alfie. On getting back to Charlotte Street Constable wrote to Dunthorne asking if he could borrow several drawings that his son Johnny had made: one of some plants and two of ‘the ashes in the town meadow’. Constable explained, ‘I am about an ash or two now.’ He said he was sending his old friend care of Flatford two large mezzotints which Lucas had just engraved of The Lock and The Cornfield. Constable had told Lucas he had heard good things about the pair of prints; it was thought they would sell.3 But an early reaction from The Spectator gave with one hand and took with the other. The engravings were done ‘with great vigour and freedom, and in successful imitation of the painter’s peculiar manner’. Moreover, mezzotint wasn’t well suited to landscape and brought out Constable’s faults more strongly. It made ‘his cold, dark colours appear blacker, and his scattered lights whiter; thus exaggerating the raw tone of his later works’.4

  The Spectator’s review is worth dwelling on because it gives a good idea of what Constable was up against now that his eccentricities were well known enough to be mocked. The writer agreed that Constable’s pictures had ‘the germ of a strong feeling for nature’, but this was hidden beneath an ‘unpleasing mannerism’. (Evidently his own ‘close and continual observance of nature’ hadn’t protected him from this.) The reviewer continued:

  His early works are admirable for the sober truth and identity of their imitation of nature; and notwithstanding he scatters a shower of snow over every landscape he paints, he cannot entirely conceal the traces of merits that he seems determined to obliterate. We know he means these little spots of white to represent the glancing particles of light that are reflected on every glossy leaf in a bright sunshiny day, or after a clearing-shower; but all the world save only himself mistake it for a representation of snow, or meal scattered over the canvas.

  The writer described the two scenes as faithfully and feelingly conveying the English countryside, but of the two he preferred The Lock for its more forceful effect. In the lane of The Cornfield, ‘the numerous little white lights produce a spottiness instead of a sparkling brilliancy, cutting up the general effect, and destroying the tone of the picture’. Moreover,

  The shepherd-boy lying down to drink at the spring, instead of making us feel how welcome is the cold draught on a sultry day, causes us to shiver as if he were dipping his face in an iced pool … The glowing warmth of Turner’s paintings subsides into sober brilliancy in engravings; the crude and cold colouring of Constable translates into harsh blackness and whiteness.5

  His only entry for the RA exhibition that year was The Valley Farm, a version of an old subject, much painted by him, Willy Lott’s house and the stream that ran past Flatford Mill. It was a large canvas, if not quite a six-footer. He worked on it through the winter and spring of 1835 and in the end didn’t use Johnny Dunthorne’s drawings but his own of a Hampstead ash, with added boughs. The prominent collector Robert Vernon (wealthy as a result of
selling horses to the British Army) was happily spending some of his fortune on British paintings; in the last couple of years he had bought two Turners, The Bridge of Sighs and The Golden Bough. Vernon came to Charlotte Street in March and saw The Valley Farm on the easel. He asked Constable whether he had painted the picture for any particular person and Constable replied, ‘Yes, sir, it was painted for a very particular person for whom I have all my life painted.’ Vernon bought the painting then and there. Leslie may have had a hand in setting the price, for Constable was unsure what to ask. Turner’s standard price for a three-foot by four-foot canvas in the late 1830s was two hundred guineas. Vernon paid Constable three hundred pounds for The Valley Farm, more than the artist had ever got for a painting before.6

  But Constable went on working on it. He wrote to George Constable a few weeks later to say happily, ‘I have got my picture into a very beautifull state. I have kept my brightness without my spottiness, and I have preserved God Almighty’s daylight, which is enjoyed by all mankind, excepting only the lovers of old dirty canvas, perished pictures at a thousand guineas each, cart grease, tar and snuff of candles …’7 It seems to have been at one of this year’s varnishing days that Constable encountered Clarkson Stanfield at work on a canvas and told him, ‘I like your picture very much.’ ‘Pooh,’ said Stanfield, ‘that won’t do, Mr Constable. I know what you say behind my back – you say of my pictures, they are all putty!’ ‘Well,’ admitted Constable, ‘well I did say so – but Mr Stanfield, I like putty.’8

  The sale of The Valley Farm insulated Constable from some of the criticism the picture engendered. Although the Athenaeum declared that Constable, ‘an original in everything, … must be compared with nature, and not with art’, the Morning Post found that ‘neither in sunshine nor in shower did we ever see anything so speckled and spotty’. The Literary Gazette thought, a touch more kindly, that his habit of sprinkling flake-white over the wet surface of his pictures and thereby concealing their beauty was here only partially successful: ‘The truth and vigour of his work manifest themselves, notwithstanding all his insidious and suicidal effects to hide them.’ Abram with brotherly kindness wrote to say that he had seen The Valley Farm ‘well-mention’d’ in The News, but failed, tactfully, to pass on the news that the paper not only said the painting was ‘full of talent’ but that ‘the daubs of white give it a cold, wiry, chalky look – which a friend remarked set his teeth on edge’. The Spectator believed Constable preferred ‘his mannerism to his fame’. The Reverend John Eagles, the amateur artist and knockabout critic whose attack on Turner the following year inspired a seventeen-year-old John Ruskin to passionate defence of his hero, wrote in Blackwood’s: ‘There is nothing here to designate a valley nor a farm.’ Eagles saw ‘something like a cow standing in some ditch-water … Such conceited imbecility is distressing.’ As for the difficult Edward Dubois, in what seems to have been a final attack in the Observer on Constable as an artist who was wealthy enough to be eccentric, Dubois said that The Valley Farm excelled in chiaroscuro, and had more than usual of Constable’s reputed power. Yet this was by contrast with his characteristic ability to maim his landscapes – as in the sky here, the ‘tossing about of the stuffings of pack-saddles among remnants of blue taffeta’.9

  Dubois seems also to have been the first to draw attention to the presence in the painting of an intruder – a cat sitting on a milk pail. A few weeks later the Literary Gazette thought the offending animal was the accidental result of atoms falling from Constable’s whiting bag. Academicians were heard asking one another, ‘Have you seen the cat?’ The guilty party was named as Edwin Landseer, who on a varnishing day had mischievously converted several of Constable’s white blobs into ‘a very pretty and intellectual cat’. Although the cat on the pail soon vanished, as the artist went on reworking his picture, another cat has since been spotted by a sharp-eyed observer, a tiny shape on the window sill of the farmhouse. Constable’s revenge?10

  The Valley Farm was another example of what had become a true Constable failing: his inability to leave well enough alone. It had always been a tendency; it was now a bad habit. He asked Leslie to drop by after he got the picture back from the Academy; he admired Leslie for his reworking of his own paintings, and he wanted him to see The Valley Farm ‘now, for it has proved to me what my art is capable of when time can be given sufficient to carry it home’. Constable spelled out to John Chalon his improvements to Mr Vernon’s picture: ‘Oiling out, making out, polishing, scraping, &c. seem to have agreed with it exceedingly. The “sleet” and “snow” have disappeared, leaving in their places, silver, ivory, and a little gold.’ In mid-December The Valley Farm was back with Mr Vernon at his great house in Pall Mall but Constable told William Carpenter that he hadn’t finished with it; it was coming back to him for ‘more last words’. Once in a while Constable recognised that his mania to rework things was counter-productive. Henry Syer Trimmer reported that Constable kept Lucas at work altering time and again a large plate – for a Salisbury Cathedral engraving, apparently – but finally exclaimed, ‘Lucas, I only wish you could bring it to the state it was nine months ago.’ Too many ‘last words’ made for the downside of his perfectionism.11

  Comparing this view of Willy Lott’s house with other versions of the subject did The Valley Farm no favours. Pictures he had done of the spot at various times both early and late had much more life, for example The Mill Stream of 1811–14, Scene on a River of 1830–7 (V&A) and Farmhouse near the water’s edge of c.1834 (also V&A). Despite Constable’s belief that he had preserved ‘God Almighty’s daylight’, the painting lost its sparkle; the bitumen he used to glaze it perhaps helped its attraction when he painted it but soon cracked and faded.12 It now seems a dead-end picture, a tired re-enactment of his Stour valley days in which – rather than daylight – gloom, gloom, gloom is the prevailing feature. Gothic was of course à la mode. Some recent viewers have detected elements of anguished nostalgia in it. ‘The tortured surface … suggests an almost desperate attempt to recreate the past,’ writes Leslie Parris, while for David Hill it is a scene from a nightmare, the man ferrying the bonneted young woman a sort of Charon, using his quant pole to push his boat across a murky Styx rather than rippling Stour.13

  *

  It was a year of family upheaval once again – this time centred on Charley going off to sea. The boy had brine in his blood. His early drawings had been of boats and at the Pierces’ school in Folkestone he had kept one eye on his books, the other on the Channel. Boner accompanied Charley on a river trip to Gravesend in July 1834. ‘A glorious piece of happiness for me,’ Charley wrote to his father. ‘We spent a very pleasant day there, it was very rough, we went in a little boat after we came down in the steamer and nea[r]ly we ship[p]ed several good seas.’ (The Reverend Pierce hadn’t had much success with Charley’s spelling.) Charley wrote to his brother John enthusiastically, ‘You can have no idea of the opposition of the Gravesend steamers on Gravesend Pier, such a pulling and fighting between the sailors, it was tremendous.’14 Pursuing his vocation, Charley – fourteen that year – returned to Gravesend to stay for several days with the Brenchley family and in the autumn of 1834 went up to Suffolk on Sidey Constable’s coasting barge Telegraph; he wrote to his father on 10 November of the excitements of the voyage to Mistley: ‘We ran through the Swin [channel] on Sunday morning & I heaved the lead for 7 miles[.] Side had a bath in the Thames rather more than he liked but I pride myself of his catching hold of an oar which I held out to him. He went bang under & was very much frightened.’15 On his return, Constable’s sister Mary wrote to her brother from Flatford:

  Your clever son Charles Golding took leave of his Suffolk friends, & set off with Captain Sidey to join the ship … yesterday – the young waterman was in high spirits & he seemed without care or any earthly trouble & I trust we shall soon hear from you of his safe arrival under your roof.

  We found him a very interesting youth, even if he had not been your son … We all did all w
e could to make him happy & his company was quite beyond his age … The wind being fair the voyage will most likely be a … quick one.

  The Telegraph voyage confirmed Charley’s nautical ambitions. He was studying mathematics with a new tutor, W.E. Bickmore, to help with his navigation. Constable considered the navy for him but was told that in this now twentieth year of peace the Admiralty list for would-be midshipmen was long.16 The East India Company was the next option. Family connections were brought into play. In East Bergholt Abram got some personal details of Captain William Hopkins, who commanded the Buckinghamshire: ‘I call’d at Mrs Clark’s this morning & told her what you said of Captain Hopkins, & they speak very highly both of him & the service, he is the brother of Miss Hopkins who was with them several years as Governess … and he has work’d his way up to his present situation from small beginnings, & why should not Charles, with his good conduct & abilities …?’ As Abram no doubt knew, Charley’s abilities were apparent, his good conduct somewhat more potential.

  The household was put into a frenzy as Charley’s departure loomed. Constable wrote to Leslie on the longest day of 1835: ‘I wish Charley well at sea – for his own sake. He is an extraordinary boy, and if his genius does not destroy him it will be the making of him – but my fear is more than my hope!!’ Constable proudly painted a portrait of Charley in his new merchant marine uniform – Mr Vernon’s purchase of The Valley Farm helped pay for the necessary seagoing clothing, and his rigging-out kept Mrs Roberts and the maids more than usually busy.17 In early August Leslie heard again from Constable: