On the last day of March he worked on Arundel Mill and Castle; it would soon have to go to the Academy exhibition. Several people who called in Charlotte Street had the impression Constable wasn’t well, but put the malaise down to his being cooped up in his painting quarters, worried about his picture. In the evening he went out on an errand for his favourite charity, the Artists’ General Benevolent Institution. He got home about nine and ate a good supper. At bedtime, however, he said he felt chilly. He asked for his bed to be warmed; the maid thought this was unusual for him. From ten until eleven he read in bed as he always did. On this occasion he was reading Robert Southey’s Life and Letters of Cowper – William Cowper, poet of religion and nature, as far as Constable was concerned a fellow spirit, author of ‘John Gilpin’s Ride’ and ‘The Task’ (which Constable particularly liked). In a letter to his friend the Reverend John Newton (3 May 1780) Cowper wrote:
I draw mountains, valleys, woods, and streams, and ducks, and dabchicks. I admire them myself, and Mrs. Unwin admires them; and her praise, and my praise put together, are fame enough for me … I amuse myself with a greenhouse which Lord Bute’s gardener could take upon his back, and walk away with; and when I have paid it the accustomed visit, and watered it, and given it air, I say to myself – ‘This is not mine, it is a plaything lent me for the present; I must leave it soon.’
After Constable had fallen asleep the maid removed his candle.11
Because he had rented out much of the upstairs of the Charlotte Street house to help cover the costs of Well Walk, he and his son John were using two adjoining bedrooms in the attic.12 Young John had been at the theatre and when he got home and went to bed, he heard his father call out. Constable was in great pain and felt giddy. His son suggested a doctor be called but Constable said no. He agreed to take some rhubarb and magnesia; this made him feel sick. He then drank some warm water, which made him vomit. The pain got worse. Constable asked John to get hold of their neighbour, Mr Michele, a medical man. He moved from his bed for a while to an upright chair, then back to bed where he lay on his side. By the time Michele arrived, Constable seemed to have fallen asleep, so his son thought, although in fact he had lost consciousness. Michele said brandy was needed as a stimulant. The maid ran downstairs to get some, but she was too late. Young John heard Constable gasp several times and then, nothing – he had stopped breathing. His hands became cold. Half an hour after the onset of the pain he was dead.13
Constable’s trusted messenger Pitt came to Leslie’s house early the next morning. It was 1 April. Leslie saw Pitt from a bedroom window as he was dressing and went downstairs, expecting to be handed a note from Constable, perhaps an invitation.14 But the message was to say that Constable had died during the night. Leslie and his wife hurried to Charlotte Street. They found the painter lying in his little attic room, looking as if he were asleep, with his watch still ticking on the bedside table and a volume of the Southey Life of Cowper alongside it. Among the many engravings hung on the walls was a print near the foot of the bed that Samuel Rogers had lent him of a moonlight scene by Rubens.15
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Constable’s death mask
Leslie remained for the rest of the day. Several death masks were made while he was there. A post-mortem was conducted by Professor Partridge of King’s College in the presence of Michele and George Young, the surgeon who had given Constable advice about how to present his Hampstead lectures. The results of the post-mortem were inconclusive. The doctors found no indication of any disease that might have killed him. His pain was thought to be from indigestion.16 Michele later told Leslie he thought that if the brandy had been given promptly it might have kept Constable alive. Nowadays we know that indigestion-like pains – ‘heartburn’ – can be signs of what is in fact a heart attack. We also know that rheumatic fever, which Constable had suffered a severe bout of, can do serious cardiac damage, can indeed be life-threatening: Dr Evans of Hampstead thought Constable never fully recovered from his rheumatic fever. Some sort of heart failure was generally suspected by commentators in the press. The Morning Chronicle’s short obituary on 3 April said the cause of death was ‘an enlargement of the heart’. The Morning Post declared that Constable died of ‘an affection of the heart’. On 9 April Bell’s Weekly Messenger said the cause appeared to be ‘spasm of the heart’. One other condition that might be taken into account was Constable’s proneness to anxiety, which John Fisher had pointed out ‘hurts the stomach more than arsenic’. He might have died of a perforated ulcer, though an ulcer should have given painful signs of its presence earlier on. He might simply have burned out his allotted store of vital spirit.17
For Leslie, the shock slowly accumulated. The suddenness of Constable’s death felt like a blow which at first stunned him and then gave him pain. He gradually learned how much he had lost in Constable, and it was more than he supposed at the time of his friend’s death.
The funeral took place in Hampstead parish church and at the tomb where Maria was buried in the graveyard. His brothers, Golding and Abram, led the mourners. Many of Constable’s friends and Hampstead neighbours were on hand. Of family members, his son John was the most noticeable absentee; he was still overwhelmed by his father’s death and too ill to attend. Perhaps as a child, close to his mother, he had lived with death too long. That most persistent of Constable’s ‘loungers’, the clergyman and amateur artist the Reverend Thomas Judkin, recited the Order for the Burial of the Dead: ‘I am the resurrection and the life … The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away … Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live … He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower … earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust … Amen.’ Judkin wept over the Book of Common Prayer and his were not the only tears that fell. Constable’s coffin was laid in the tomb alongside Maria’s. Some of the mourners noted again the Latin lines he had borrowed from Dr Gooch and had had inscribed for her on the stone side of the tomb:
Alas! From how slender a thread hangs
All that is sweetest in life.18
24. The Other Side of the Grave (1837– )
THE FIRST ACADEMY exhibition in the new buildings on what was becoming Trafalgar Square was also the first in thirty-four years not to have John Constable on hand. His son John was now head of the family, but Charles Leslie had his work cut out as friend, adviser and protector to the Constable children. For a start, Leslie ensured that Constable was represented at the Academy exhibition. An RA rule allowed an artist’s hitherto unexhibited work to be hung at the first exhibition after his death, and so Arundel Mill and Castle was entered by Leslie on Constable’s behalf. So were two smaller pictures, but the selectors seem to have thought these weren’t sufficiently finished. At the exhibition, Arundel Mill was received in the light of its creator’s passing, for the most part kindly. John Bull declared that the painting showed how great a loss the public had suffered. In recent years, its writer said, Constable had spoiled some of his beautiful works by whitewashing them. Yet now he stood high as a draughtsman, colourist and artist ‘of feeling, science, and power’. The paper presciently concluded: ‘His early works are truth and nature themselves; and, unless we much mistake, all his works, now that he is gone, will be held in very great estimation.’ (Constable would have noted ruefully that he was indeed on the way to being a popular artist, even if going, i.e. dying, had to be part of the process.) The Reverend John Eagles, reviewer for Blackwood’s, moderated his usual offensiveness by saying the painting was unfinished and it was therefore unfair to exhibit it. But Eagles was sorry at the loss of Constable and said ‘some of his earlier pictures were both sweetly and vigorously painted’. Arundel Mill and Castle was among the works put up for sale by the artist’s administrators on 16 May 1838 and was bought in on behalf of John Charles Constable.1
Leslie cautioned the young man to lock up all the sketches that had been left lying loose on the floor of his father’s painting room. Leslie also set about organising a committee to buy one of Constable�
�s larger pictures as a permanent memorial and donate it to the National Gallery. Clarkson Stanfield was among several warm supporters of the plan. Reverend Judkin, William Carpenter and William Purton joined in. The ‘large Salisbury’ – Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows – was considered; Leslie asked John Charles to leave the key to the Charlotte Street studio with Mrs Roberts so that would-be donors to the gift fund could look at it and other Constable paintings there. Eventually the large Salisbury was judged to be too boldly executed and not suitable for ‘the general taste’. The Cornfield, Purton’s recommendation, was chosen instead. The estate valued it at three hundred guineas. Sir William Beechey was appointed chairman of the money-raising committee and over a hundred people subscribed. David Wilkie sent five guineas; William Wordsworth and Michael Faraday gave too. On 9 December 1837 the Trustees of the National Gallery gratefully accepted the painting to which the artist had once given ‘a little more eye-salve than usual’. One old friend of the artist who visited Charlotte Street, the miniature painter Andrew Robertson, felt melancholy at the great number of works Constable had left; this showed how little his merits had been recognised. But he thought the presence of The Cornfield in the National Gallery would prevent Constable’s works being buried until, eventually dug up, they were ‘brought to live in another age’.2
At his death Constable was worth about £25,000. He had £528 in his bank account with Cocks Biddulph at Charing Cross. The Bank of England held in his name £12,000 in annuities that Charles Bicknell’s legacy had purchased for the benefit of Maria and the children. Abram owed him £4,000 on which 4 per cent interest was due. Others, including Dr Herbert Evans and Lancelot Archer-Burton, owed him more than £1,000. The contents of his houses – both leased – were worth over £500 and his ‘Books Pictures Prints Drawings and other Articles relating to the Fine Arts’, £1,900. Yet the administrators of his estate felt more should be raised to cover the future needs of his children, and so some works would be auctioned.3
The sale occurred during thirteen days in May 1838. Beforehand Leslie and Mr Foster of the auctioneers came to Charlotte Street to list items for the catalogue. Leslie varnished some of the paintings, starting with The Chain Pier, Brighton. John Charles had transferred from Corpus Christi to Jesus College, Cambridge, to be with Osmond Fisher, and during his Christmas and Easter vacations he began to ‘set the pictures to rights’, listing all the oil sketches, drawings and prints he found at Well Walk and Charlotte Street, while trying to pursue his algebra studies, a task that laid him low. Meanwhile, Foster’s advertisements for the sale were appearing in the press and visitors began to call at Charlotte Street to look at the pictures, among them William Carpenter, the Hampstead amateurs Henry Hebbert and W.G. Jennings, General Rebow and several friends of Leslie’s.4
At the time the sale didn’t seem a great success. Prices obtained were generally low. The art trade was obviously uncertain about bidding for works – thrown suddenly on the market – of a landscape artist whose reputation wasn’t clear cut. However, on the first day of the sale, 10 May 1838, many of the 5,000 prints and drawings were sold. They included prints of works by Titian and Claude, and original drawings by Richard Wilson, Gainsborough and George Frost. The prints and drawings fetched a total of £648 12s 6d. Most of the buyers were in the trade, but John Sell Cotman was one bidder who entered the fray with the dealers. Twenty-nine of the cloud and sky studies sold for £3 11s. As for the Constable/Lucas venture English Landscape, the copyright, plates and more than 7,000 unsold prints were offered but bought in for £100. Perhaps just as well, for the prints proved useful in a few years’ time to Charles Leslie. Lucas himself was ill-served by Constable’s death. The loss of his patron took place as photography advanced. With a declining practice, the talented printmaker eventually took to drink and spent some time in the Fulham workhouse before his death in 1881.5
The paintings put up for sale on 15 and 16 May included copies Constable had made of some of his favourite old masters and his own original works. Nearly 150 of these paintings were sold and twenty-five bought in; the proceeds £1,764. Some of his full-size oil sketches were now seen in public for the first time, among them two sketches for The Hay Wain and The Leaping Horse, bought in for £14 10s to be given by Purton and Carpenter to the Constable children. The large oil sketches weren’t valued highly: the Hadleigh Castle exhibited in 1829 sold for £105 and the full-size sketch for it for £3 13s 6d. Many of Constable’s works raised doubts; no one knew enough about him or about all these pictures suddenly released on the art world. What was typical? What was a sound investment? The White Horse went to the children’s legal guardian, Lancelot Archer-Burton, for the highest price of the sale, £157 10s. (Archer-Burton, who had changed his name from Lancelot South on inheriting property, was married to Constable’s cousin Jane Gubbins; their son Burton, Folkestone schoolmate of Constable’s two oldest sons, followed John Charles up to Cambridge.) John Charles attended the sale and bought three paintings, one a View of London from Hampstead Heath. The number of dealers on hand indicated that some in the trade suspected a rise in Constable futures. Samuel Archbutt bought fourteen paintings. J.H. Smith, acting for John Sheepshanks, tussled with a collector named Anderton for Water Meadows at Salisbury, the ‘nasty green thing’ the RA selectors had wanted to reject in 1830; Smith obtained it for Sheepshanks for £35. 14s. Despite the many pictures returned to the family, and despite the less than dramatic prices, the Foster sale got many Constables out into the world and gave the name resonance.6
The houses in Well Walk and Charlotte Street were emptied of much material that had sustained them. The children weren’t badly off: to the Bicknell legacy and their father’s funds was added a bequest from Constable’s older brother Golding, warden of Lady Dysart’s woods, who died in March 1838 aged sixty-four. The children moved to 16 Cunningham Place, St John’s Wood, where they were closer to Archer-Burton (in Grove End Road) and Charles Leslie (in Pine Apple Place). There Mrs Roberts went on putting her heart and soul into their care. Charley referred to ‘Old Lady Ribbons’ in a letter in 1846, and in 1853 he asked Minna to give ‘Old Bob’ two sovereigns from him as ‘a little remembrance’. She was mentioned in family correspondence as late as 1862. Uncle Abram came to Cunningham Place to see his nephews and nieces in February 1839 and found it, though smaller than Charlotte Street, ‘comfortable’ and ‘convenient’. (Hints of discord appeared between the heirs and Uncle Abram.) Charley had learned about his father’s death on arriving in Bombay after a gale-ridden voyage. He wrote to his brother John, ‘How hard it seems that the Almighty should have snatched so kind and good a Father from us.’ Charley wanted to know that some of the drawings and sketchbooks were safe, and mentioned them anxiously again in his next letter: ‘I mean the Book of Sketches in the Coutes Indiaman and the two Brighton sketch books.’ The drawings dealt with the sea, which was now Charley’s world. At the end of August 1838 he came back to England and quit the Buckinghamshire. However, he went on learning navigation, studied steam engineering, and talked of becoming the mate of a brig and serving in the Mediterranean. But as with many a Conradian hero, the East had seduced him. He was commissioned a midshipman in the Indian Navy in April 1839. In India he met a naval lieutenant who recalled riding in a Hampstead coach with John Constable some years before. The artist had in his lap a toy cutter, a gift for his son, who he said was passionate about ships. The lieutenant begged him not to let Charles go to sea. He would be away from his family for long periods; promotion was so slow. And Charley ran into both problems. He made lieutenant in 1845 and commander eighteen years after that. He conducted surveys of Eastern waters – the chart he drew of the Persian Gulf was still used in 1936.7 He married in 1861, the only Constable child to do so, his wife a Maida Vale girl, who died in childbirth. Charley’s second wife was the daughter of next-door neighbours in Cunningham Place. Five of his children, Constable’s only grandchildren, survived childhood. Charley retired in 1863 with the honorary rank of captain a
nd came back to England for good.8
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John and Maria Constable’s family was generally neither robust nor lucky. Minna had survived her bout of scarlet fever, but two of her siblings didn’t. Emily – who shared the same birthday as Charley – caught the disease in May 1839, aged fourteen. Dr Evans came frequently, as he had done for Minna, and Mrs Roberts looked after her day and night (she too caught scarlet fever but was tough enough to live). Emily – Emma – Ema – died on 8 May. Scarlet fever used to kill more children in Britain than any other disease; it brought on a very high temperature, strawberry-red tongue and face, painful throat infection and rashes. Emily’s brother John once again stuck his head in the sand. He wrote from Cambridge, ‘There is nothing that I dislike so much as to be present on such occasions, besides while I am away it seems more dream like.’9 John was now interested in the chemistry of photography, but was also caught up by religion – he hoped to obtain a curacy after taking his degree. He was engaged to Mary Atkinson, daughter of the Surrey couple who had looked after him when he broke down after his father’s death. His rooms at Cambridge were full of Constable’s paintings and sketches. He told Mary about a dream one of his university friends had had about him. A service was being held in the college chapel and the congregation were looking at a lancet window in which young John was seated, wearing episcopal robes, with a mitre on his head. But there was neither curacy nor bishopric to come. His forebodings kept him from funerals, but for other people John didn’t duck reality; his medical studies involved working in Cambridge hospital wards, and while getting such hands-on experience he too contracted scarlet fever. John Charles died on 21 March 1841. He was buried in Jesus College chapel, the last person to be buried there. Osmond Fisher arranged for a tablet in John’s memory over the grave.10
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