John Constable
Page 31
My poor Charley’s time is now very short in the land of comfort. The ship sails this week. The house has been long in a stir with his ‘outfit’ – there seems no end to the wants … What would Diogenes or an old sow (much the same thing) say to all this display of trousers, jackets, & by dozens – blue & white shirts by scores – and a supply of ratlin for the hammock, as he expects to be often cut down.
Constable was trying to be light-hearted but he felt stricken at the prospect of saying goodbye to the lad, who was ‘full of sentiment & poetry & determination & integrity’. Nine-year-old Robert Leslie was allowed to accompany Constable, Alfred, and Mrs Roberts to look around the Buckinghamshire in the East India Dock, with Charley, according to his father, promising to ‘show how the planks are laid, and the “timbers” and all’.18 (Robert Leslie, as noted, became a skilled amateur sailor and boatbuilder as well as a professional sea-painter; this visit – together with Turner’s rigging of his toy-ship at Petworth – may have helped determine his life.) Charley hung close to his father and asked him to stay until the next day, but Constable couldn’t bear to prolong the farewell; he shook hands and said goodbye.19 But he was happy with his view of the Buckinghamshire: ‘A noble ship, the size of a 74.’20
By the end of August Charley’s real sea life had begun. He wrote several letters home while the Buckinghamshire, bound for Bombay, called at Gravesend and Spithead. The ship had been held up in the Thames by thick fog. On 30 August: ‘We anchored a few miles below Woolwich late in the evening because we went against the tide. We had two large foreign steamboats tow us down on each side. When the anchor went [down] it brought to my mind exactly how you had described it to me on board the Coutes.’ Charley observed that when the anchor was raised next morning, the sailors heaved at the capstan while a fiddle was played to encourage their efforts. He’d found the only disagreeable thing so far was to be awakened out of a sound sleep ‘to keep two cold hours watch’. Luckily he’d got a well-ventilated berth near a hatch. From the anchorage at St Helens, off the Isle of Wight, they had collected cargo and passengers, and glimpsed the Victory moored in Portsmouth harbour. Then they set off down Channel in a hard blow, with Charley aloft on the mizzen topsail yard, reefing the sail, letting go one line, hauling on another, while the ship pitched, rolled, and lurched in the heavy seas. Charley told his father in a last note sent with the pilot as he was dropped off Start Point: ‘We have a great many gentlemen passengers on board … Some of them had a hearty laugh at seeing my cap blow far away to leeward from the mizen and just after went my right shoe.’21
Constable proudly told Leslie that his son was ‘a true sailor – he makes up his mind to combat all difficulties in calms or storms with an evenness of mind – which little belongs to me, a landsman. They have had a rough business of it so far.’ And to George Constable in Arundel, where Charley’s brother John had been staying, Constable wrote frankly about his anxious time:
I have done all for the best, and I regret all that I have done, when I consider that it was to bereave me of this delightfully clever boy, who would have shone in my own profession, and who is now doomed to be driven about on the ruthless sea. It is a sad and melancholy life, but he seems made for a sailor. Should he please the officers and stick to the ship, it will be more to his advantage than being in the navy, – a hateful tyranny, with starvation into the bargain.22
Constable’s early experience in Lavenham apparently still left its mark. Those in authority could well be tyrants. But perhaps he also remembered his own struggle to follow the path he had picked out, and his father’s acquiesence in and support for what he chose to do.
Charley had preoccupied him this year but not to the exclusion of all else, though the other children got less dramatic attention. The girls were still at Miss Noble’s in Hampstead. Emily, now ten, wrote in June 1835:
My dear Papa,
I hope you will be pleased with this my first letter and I will try that my next shall be better. The holidays will very soon begin, and I trust you will find me improved in my studies. Give my love to my Brothers, and to Roberts,
And believe me, your affectionate child,
Emily Constable23
Minna seized any chance to be maternal and tidied up her father’s possessions to a point where he couldn’t find anything. Constable took Minna and young John down to George Constable’s for a few days in July and was happy walking among the riverside willows and hanging woods of the Arun valley. Alfie was also at a Hampstead school, run by Mr Brooks. Constable told Leslie, ‘He plays first fiddle there in everything but his books – but poor boy, his whole life till now has been one of afflictions, which as well as his drollery … has endeared him to me – perhaps unduly so.’ Lionel went for a while to a dame’s school kept by a Mrs Rawley but then joined Alfie at the Brooks establishment. As for young John, now studying in London, he went off happy and well on a trip to France, though he didn’t care for the food there: too much vinegar in everything. He visited the Louvre but wasn’t marked by the experience. The only picture he remembered, when being debriefed, was (Constable reported to Leslie) ‘the Watteau, “where ever so many cupids & people were flying about the sky & climbing up the mast of a boat.” As to Ruisdael, Claude, Poussin & Titian, he knows little and cares less.’ Constable himself was still set against the Continent; he wrote to Boner in late June declining an invitation to Germany to see the mountains. ‘Such a range of scenery … would expand my ideas of landscape’ but also cause him, he feared, ‘to lose his character as a painter’.24 That character was to some members of the public still uncertain. Constable was asked to testify at this time in a dispute about the genuineness of a purported Claude. In its report on the matter, The Times called him an ‘amateur painter’.25 In March 1836 he wrote again to Boner to say things were going smoothly: ‘My own “oneness” of pursuit leads to little change, more than the subject on my easil, but thank God all the children are well.’26
His son John was studying ‘Chymistry, Anatomy & Materia Medica’, with lectures and anatomy lessons in the daytime and extra tuition in Latin from Charley’s tutor Mr Bickmore in the evenings. John had thoughts of becoming a clergyman or doctor or even both after Cambridge. Now that Boner had departed, he was also serving as his father’s personal assistant. John told Constable about the visitors who called when he was away lecturing and kept him up to date with household finances: ‘The money will hold out very well.’ Constable in turn did his best to keep his son informed, telling him, for example, ‘Mr Vernon paid me for the picture.’ In December 1835 young John was entered as a future student of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. A few days later Abram called at Charlotte Street with six gallons of linseed oil for David Lucas, ‘as pure as the seed can produce it’, Abram said. (The family firm continued to be useful.) Constable and John went to Flatford for a week at Christmas and Mary thought the occasion was ‘a very happy one’. (The girls went to stay with their aunt Louisa Sanford in Wimbledon.) Constable had been consulted by Abram on works at Dedham Mill – the shaft of which needed repair – and Abram was next involved in what Mary called ‘vast works’ on the lock gates there: ‘His heart well nigh fails him under all his cares.’27
While at Flatford, Constable discussed with his brother and sister a proposal Mary had put forward – ‘between hope and fright’ – to buy some local land. Abram, as always cautious about spending capital, had reservations at first but didn’t discourage her when she got interested in part of the Coleman estate, which included Old House Farm and land called Fishers. Mary asked: What if she took the former and Constable took the latter? ‘A small portion of England in East Bergholt … would prove a harmless link of worldly pleasure,’ she suggested. It was on the east side of the village, south of the road from the centre, some way beyond the lane that went down to Flatford, and next to the Dodnice River and some beautiful woods. The timber was excellent though brother Golding didn’t altogether approve of the soil. The price being asked was £4,000. S
he thought it a benefit, should they become ‘Easterns’, that the new rail road wouldn’t cross the land. (This was the Ipswich section of the Eastern Counties Railway, designed to run eventually from London to Yarmouth, and then built as far north as Colchester.) In May 1836 Abram wrote to Constable to say the purchase had been agreed – a deposit of £200 paid and completion to be at Michaelmas. Mary intended to farm all the land and pay rent to Constable for his part of it; she anticipated much pleasure from it. By 20 May 1836 she had engaged an elderly couple, Mr and Mrs Crosbie, to help with the farm and dairy.
Constable thus became the owner of Bergholt land. The family’s former house was still owned by Mr and Mrs Walter Clerk who had bought it in 1818. Abram in May 1836 said that he had spent ‘a most agreeable evening … at the Old House’, and that Mr Clerk – with long-term health problems – was ‘much better, but tender’. The new Constable land was shown on the local tithe map for 30 December 1837, with Mary as the occupier, and a tithes and rent charge of £32 6s od paid to the incumbent rector, Reverend Joshua Rowley. Various buildings and pieces of land owned by Constable and Mary were specified on the map. They included Little Taylor’s, Whins, Flax Field, Barn Field, Gar, Bean Field, Cross Path Field, Bridge Field, Lays, Long Meadow, Long Fen, Stoneland’s, Coleman’s, Fisher’s Fen, Forty Acres, Broom Knoll, Quaking Fen, Fisher’s Field, Wright’s Fen, Great Taylors, Park Field, Spooners, an allotment, some yards, some buildings and a garden. Bergholt names. But for the moment Constable didn’t have the chance to visit his new property.28
22. Two Monuments (1836)
CONSTABLE HAD ONLY one complaint against Leslie: his good friend, even though back in the same city, lived too far away. His house in Pineapple Place was on the east side of Edgware Road, just beyond the old Kilburn Gate.1 It was on the edge of open country, with hayfields that extended to Harrow-on-the-Hill. Constable insisted the place was fatal to Leslie’s friendships, but nevertheless got himself there quite often. Leslie also came frequently to Hampstead or Charlotte Street. He dined with Constable on Christmas Eve 1834, when Samuel Rogers, David Wilkie and Jack Bannister were among the company. Leslie and Constable were different as artists but in some ways similar as men. What brought them together may have been that they were both somewhat out of the London swim and at a distance from their roots. Both favoured black clothing; both were warm individuals under a surface severity. Yet Leslie might not have taken to Constable if he hadn’t admired his paintings. He cultivated Constable’s friendship because he liked his art.2 And because Constable in turn liked Leslie so much – and felt for Leslie’s wife and children an immense affection, almost as if they were reflections of his own lost Maria and his own chicks – he admired Leslie’s paintings more than might have been expected. Leslie was essentially an illustrator, whose narrative pictures dealt with literary or historical subjects, such as his Uncle Toby and Widow Wadman or his Autolycus selling his wares. Constable lent him sky studies and, in March 1836, for the Autolycus sent him a rough sketch of a mountain ash he thought might be helpful. Leslie took the hint and introduced such a tree with its red berries to a sliver of landscape behind his shepherd and young woman.
In time Leslie would be accused of creating in his memoir too deferential a portrait of Constable, as if he were a superior being; but Leslie often wrote acutely about his friend. Although Constable didn’t have a very large circle of friends – or a great number of admirers of his pictures – they ‘compensated for their fewness by their sincerity and their warmth’. Leslie thought that Constable’s genius, in both his character and his art, didn’t suit his time. His stand-offishness was a problem, but despite it ‘no man more earnestly desired to stand well with the world; no artist was more solicitous of popularity’. On the one hand he desired approbation, on the other he couldn’t conceal the candid opinions that made people find him disagreeable. ‘What he said had too much point not to be repeated, and too much truth not to give offence; so some of his competitors hated him and most were afraid of him … He was opposed to all cant in art, to all that is merely specious and fashionable … He followed … his own feelings in the choice of subject and the mode of treatment. With great appearance of docility, he was an uncontrollable man.’ When people accuse Leslie of seeing Constable through rose-coloured spectacles, they should recall that remarkable epithet, ‘uncontrollable’.
Among Constable’s acquaintances at this time was Samuel Rogers, well known for his breakfast parties for the great, good, and talented at his house in St James’s Place, who was also to be encountered at Lord Egremont’s in Petworth along with Chantrey, Beechey, Turner, and Leslie. Constable had a memorable London morning with the banker-poet in March 1836. Rogers told Constable he was on ‘the right road’ as a landscape painter and that nobody could explain its history so well. Constable thought Rogers had the best private collection of paintings in London and particularly admired his Rubens. Rogers was pleased when Constable noticed the falling star in it. Constable watched his host feed some sparrows from the breakfast table; the sparrows seemed to know him well. Yet Rogers seemed also to tap into Constable’s dissatisfaction and melancholy. He told Constable that genius had to put up with the burden of being hated. Constable surprisingly demurred at this, though he agreed it could be true ‘in nature’. He wrote to Leslie afterwards, ‘I told him if he could catch one of those sparrows, and tie a bit of paper about its neck, and let it off again, the rest would peck it to death for being so distinguished.’3
The Royal Academy was in its final days at Somerset House. Leslie was on the Arrangement Committee in 1836 and Constable was pestered by ‘sparrows’ of a different sort, artists so-nicknamed who were hoping to get their works shown and who believed that a good friend of Leslie’s might sway the selection process. Some hopefuls sent not only supplications but their actual canvases to Charlotte Street, adding to the pressure on Constable. Among the ‘Hammatures’ (as he called them) seeking approval was the devoted Reverend Judkin; another was the French artist Auguste Hervieu, who had helped The White Horse get to Lille in 1825. Constable, aware from his own experience that he was being a nuisance, put in a word not only for Hervieu but for J.M. Nixon, a historical painter who had provided display placards for his lectures, for William C. Ross, a miniature artist, and for Samuel Lane, his old, handicapped, portrait-painting friend. That a painter was, like Nixon, ‘a kind and good father’, or like W.H. Fisk, from Thorpe-le-Soken in Essex, not far from the Stour, ‘a kind, good, amiable man’ (whose wife moreover had once made ‘some beautifull salve for Maria’s chilblains’), all made a difference to Constable, whose high standards vis-à-vis Berchem and Both didn’t come into play when it was a matter of the Academy and people he knew. However, his caustic tongue wasn’t completely subdued. One Brighton property owner, W.W. Altree, who was concerned to ensure that an architectural drawing of some villas he proposed to build was prominently hung, was – Constable told Leslie – ‘a great fool, and very ignorant, & forward in consequence’.
Constable entered two pictures for the exhibition, the last at Somerset House: The Cenotaph and Stonehenge, two sorts of monument. The first was a painting of a memorial to Sir Joshua Reynolds in the park of Coleorton Hall, but was also by the way a memorial to Sir George Beaumont, who had placed it there, and to the Academy itself. Constable had made a drawing of it back in November 1823, and wrote to Fisher about his visit: ‘In the dark recesses of these gardens … I saw an urn – & bust of Sir Joshua Reynolds – & under it some beautifull verses, by Wordsworth.’ The Beaumonts had laid the first stone for it on 30 October 1812, with Joseph Farington on hand. Constable had quoted Reynolds’s Discourses ten years before, to the effect that there was no easy way of becoming a good painter. In 1813 he had written to Maria about his liking for Reynolds’s paintings: ‘Here is no vulgarity or rawness and yet no want of life or vigor – it is certainly the finest feeling [for] art that ever existed.’ The Cenotaph, like The Valley Farm, is an elegiac, even funereal, painting, with a
tiny robin and an alert deer the only life in it; the trees are bare, the sky mostly masked by their branches. Constable wrote to George Constable that it was ‘a tolerably good picture for the Academy, [though] not The Mill, which I had hoped to do … I preferred to see Sir Joshua Reynolds name and Sir George Beaumont’s once more in the catalogue, for the last time at the old house … The Exhibition is much liked. Wilkie’s pictures are very fine, and Turner has outdone himself; he seems to paint with tinted steam, so evanescent and so airy.’ The deer was probably meant to evoke Sir George’s fondness for As You Like It, the play set in the Forest of Arden, where melancholy Jaques observed a wounded stag.4
Memorial to Sir Joshua Reynolds at Coleorton, 1823
While he was at work on The Cenotaph two young brothers, Alfred and Robert Tidey, visited Constable. Robert, the younger of the artistically inclined pair, wrote later:
I was interested and amused by his mode of work and the way in which he produced such wonderful effects in his pictures by dabbing on splashes of colour with his palette knife in lieu of brush and stepping well back into the room now and again to view the result, remarking to my brother in an absent sort of way, ‘How will that do, Tidey, eh? How will that do?’ He seemed to me, as I believe he was, a man of extreme gentleness and simplicity of character.5
The Cenotaph got a fairly good press. Abram told his brother he heard well of it. Constable wrote to George Constable, ‘I hear it is liked, but I see no newspaper, not allowing one to come into my house.’ In fact, the Observer (with Edward Dubois departed) was coming on side: ‘The peculiar manner in which Mr Constable’s pictures are painted makes them appear singular at first, but by choosing a proper distance for observing them, by degrees the effect seems to grow upon us until we are astonished that we did not like them better before.’ The Times seemed to like the somewhat sententious lines by Wordsworth that Constable quoted in the catalogue more than the ‘singularly finished’ picture itself.6 But the Morning Herald and the Morning Post both approved of the painting, the latter deciding that ‘like all the pictures of Mr Constable, the present is marked by peculiarities, but they are the peculiarities of an original style, without the tricks of mannerism’. It was a word that kept coming up, even when it was being denied. Indeed, the Athenaeum thought the picture ‘less mannered’ than Constable’s works usually were; and Bell’s Weekly Messenger declared the painting had much beauty, albeit with ‘a singularity of style in the execution that rather approaches to mannerism’.7