John Constable

by Anthony Bailey

  Loss piled on loss, therefore. Charley as the oldest surviving son was now head of the family. But Minna, two years older, was on the spot and effectively in charge of affairs, with legal help from J.D. Haverfield, a friend of her father’s. Borrowings of drawings and prints made her anxious; she missed having someone close by to comfort her. ‘I begin to feel the loss of a mother now more than ever,’ she said. And the children seemed to have inherited from their father some of his prickliness. Charles in the late 1860s denounced as fakes a number of Constable pictures that were in fact genuine. He also bore a long grudge against Minna and Isabel for the way they shared out Constable’s works among the surviving children in five supposedly equal parts at the end of 1847. He said they had divided among themselves all the shipping pictures he believed belonged to him. Later, when he was twenty-six, Minna twenty-eight, and Isabel twenty-five, he recorded his problems with his sisters and noted ‘all love has been quenched in their lonely hearts’. They thought he had taken advantage of them. The sniping and griping was passed down. Charley’s second son Hugh Golding Constable relayed the memories of his side of the family of how small-minded his aunts had been: ‘They had been belles & asked everywhere & spoilt and besides that they lived in London.’ At least it was clear as they squabbled over the pictures that they knew they had inherited a treasure.11

  The habit of art was attached to them all. John Charles and Charles Golding both drew ships. Isabel attended the School of Design at Somerset House where ‘classes for Females’ were held and she went on to paint skilful plant and flower studies. Alfred and Lionel had a reputation of being hard to handle when together – ‘unsettled wild boys’, Minna called them in a letter to Charley in India – but both studied painting and showed strongly their father’s influence as landscape artists. Alfred, on leaving school aged sixteen, went to stay with Uncle Abram and Aunt Mary in Flatford where he fished and boated and sketched the meadows below Fen Bridge. He had thought of going to sea like Charley but after a period of drawing from the Antique at the British Museum enrolled at what had been the Sass Academy, now moved to Bloomsbury Street and run by F.S. Cary, a former Sass pupil. Lionel, after dallying with farming, also went to Cary’s Academy and drew the plaster casts. When Alfred exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1847, Charley wrote to Minna to say, ‘It is a great comfort though to see Alfa actually exhibiting, this looks as if he was all right, but I remain very anxious about Toby.’ Toby – that is Lionel – was in fact the most talented; he had four paintings at the RA in 1850; his works sometimes showed original flair but were also on occasion taken for his father’s. He and Alfred sent samples to each other and also to Charley who wrote, ‘I should like wild bits or coast bits, racey of course … let them have “breadth”.’ By ‘racey’ Charley seems to have meant something not tame, something with punch. Raciness was a term Constable had used in writing to John Fisher.12

  But the promising careers of both young Constables were abbreviated. Robert Leslie later described how Alfred and Lionel were rowing across the Thames above the weir at Goring Mill when their home-made boat upset. ‘It was in November, 1853, on a dark, frosty evening, and, though able to swim, he [Alfred] sank before reaching the river bank, overcome probably by cold and shock. His brother Lionel narrowly escaped being carried over the weir, and, on looking round after reaching shore, was horrified to find that Alfred … had disappeared.’ The family believed that Lionel suffered a stroke following his brother’s drowning. He gave up painting and occupied his time with carpentry, photography, sailing, and making fireworks. By 1885, towards the end of his life, he was living in St John’s Wood again with Minna and Isabel.13

  After John Constable’s death, it wasn’t long before his life was given literary shape. John Fisher in 1826 had already seen his friend as a subject and said that he had always wanted to write about Constable’s life as an artist,14 but he never managed to do so. His own life slipped away before Constable’s. Charles Boner, who went off to become a tutor to a princely family in Germany, and who composed well-regarded poetry and travel books, also missed his chance, though he had preserved a store – almost a shrine – of Constable memories. ‘I ought to have done it,’ he said years later (in 1865). ‘No one could write such a life of Constable as I might have done. To know all the beauty and sweetness of that man’s mind one must have been with him always, as I was.’15

  The person who got in first, forestalled Boner, and seemed for many years to have written the only necessary Life was Charles Leslie. He started pulling together material not long after Constable died. He obtained recollections from the children. In 1840 he went to Flatford, accompanied by William Purton, visited the mill and saw the old family house up in the village; what Leslie described as a handsome mansion was then unoccupied and was soon to be pulled down. Leslie talked to Abram, who had once claimed his brother John would be famous, after death if not before. He visited Constable’s sisters and had for guides to the locality young John and his cousin the Reverend Daniel Whalley.16 Leslie did a first-rate job of assembling anecdotes and letters and converting them into the Memoirs of the Life of John Constable, Esq., R.A. The first edition of around two hundred copies, brought out in 1843 with James Carpenter as the nominal publisher, was illustrated from the overstock of English Landscape prints, supplied by Minna in return for thirty free copies of the Life. (In 1843 Minna still had 186 sets of English Landscape, several thousand prints in all.)17 Although her brother Charles was annoyed that Leslie had related some of his adolescent adventures on the Buckinghamshire, he approved of the general thrust: ‘The good, quiet, character of poor Papa is kept up throughout.’ One hundred and five copies of the book went to subscribers. Leslie might have noted once more that Constable’s friends ‘compensated for their fewness by their sincerity and their warmth’ – and their willingness to shell out for the book. A second ‘popular’ edition was called for, smaller in format, and illustrated only by two portraits of Constable and one mezzotint, that of Spring: East Bergholt Common. Longmans published it in 1845. Although it was slow to sell, other editions eventually followed.18

  Leslie was praised for the skill with which he let Constable tell the story in his own words, although in fact he often modified or polished Constable’s language. He omitted names where he feared people might be embarrassed. He wanted to show Constable as a genius, but not one who was too earthy or rough-hewn. Maria’s protests against her husband’s overlong stays with the Beaumonts weren’t mentioned. This rose-tinting was later to be held against the biographer. Leslie’s ‘kindlier nature’ had clothed his portrait of Constable, Richard Redgrave thought in his Century of Painters of 1866. Elsewhere Redgrave suggested that Leslie’s Constable was agreeable but insufficient: ‘He appears all amiability and goodness, and one cannot recognise the bland, yet intense, sarcasm of his nature: soft and amiable in speech, he yet uttered sarcasms which cut you to the bone.’19 Even Leslie seems to have recognised that the portrait needed darker shading. In his Autobiographical Reflections of 1860, he drew attention to Constable’s love of approbation and insistence on getting his own way. Unlike Turner, who wasn’t so articulate and never talked of his own art if he could help it, Constable couldn’t be prevented from talking of his feelings and views on art. Leslie noted, ‘This made him extremely interesting to those who could feel with him, but either tiresome or repulsive to those who could not.’20

  By mid-century Constable was the subject of increasing interest, and in the pros and cons of what was said about him we discern a radical rather than conservative artist. The art critic P.G. Hamerton confessed to failing to recognise what Constable was up to early on, but waking up to it in the mid-1860s. Constable, he wrote, ‘did not see lines but spaces, and in the spaces he did not see simple gradations, but an immense variety of differently coloured sparkles and spots. This variety really exists in nature, and Constable first directed attention to it.’ Hamerton pointed out that the French had not only taken up Constable earlier but continu
ed to admire him. Paul Huet, Théodore Rousseau, Eugène Delacroix and many others claimed him as a messiah. For Delacroix, in 1858, Constable was ‘the father’ of modern French landscape painting, a ‘real reformer’, and, with Turner, one of the glories of English art; had the French but known it, the sparkles and spots of impressionism were shortly to appear. Théophile Thoré, the French writer who first cast a spotlight on the identity and works of Johannes Vermeer, wished The Cornfield were in Paris rather than London; in the Louvre, he thought, Constable’s painting would have been more greatly appreciated.21

  One vocal and discordant voice was also heard. John Ruskin did not like Constable. It seemed to be almost personal, though they never met. It was as if Ruskin found in Constable’s work a direct affront to his hero Turner. For Ruskin wild mountain scenery was the thing; Constable was morbidly enamoured of a well-tended landscape and other subjects of a ‘low order’. Constable’s ‘early education and associations were … against him’. He couldn’t draw. ‘His works are also eminently wanting both in rest and refinement.’22 He was unteachable – by which Ruskin seemed to mean unaffected by the great authorities of the past; for instance, he wouldn’t let himself be instructed by the Scriptures. Moreover, his devotion to chiaroscuro and its shadows contributed to his damnation. His works were ‘mere studies of effect without any expression of specific knowledge’. And his effects, Ruskin complained (following Fuseli), were ‘greatcoat weather and nothing more’. Turner looked at a landscape and godlike saw ‘at a glance the whole sum of visible truth open to human intelligence’. Constable saw in the same scene merely what might be observed by an intelligent fawn and a skylark. Ruskin allowed that Constable might be original, honest, and free from affectation, but he was ultimately ‘nothing more than an industrious and innocent amateur blundering his way to a superficial expression of one or two popular aspects of common nature’. Ruskin was interested in skies, and in the neglect of them by contemporary painters; but he completely ignored Constable’s contribution to the subject.23

  Leslie defended his old friend while he was Professor of Painting at the RA from 1847 to 1852. In his Handbook for Young Painters of 1855, based on his Academy lectures, Leslie declared that Constable filled a place among British painters that Turner, however great, couldn’t fill. Constable was ‘the most genuine painter of English cultivated scenery, leaving untouched its mountains and lakes’. Far from being unteachable, Constable from start to finish learned from previous masters; he made copies of Raphael cartoons, of etchings after and paintings by Ruysdael, and of paintings by Wilson, Rubens, Teniers and Claude. As for Ruskin’s charge that Constable was unable to draw, Leslie suggested that Ruskin had never seen a genuine painting by Constable – his impressions were perhaps founded on some of the forgeries that were now circulating or – a real dig – he had seen Constable pictures ‘without looking at them, which often happens when we are not interested’. Unlike Ruskin’s hero, ‘Constable never fell into the common mistake by which even Turner appears to have been influenced, namely, that what are called warm colours are essential to convey the idea of warmth in a landscape. The truth is, that red, orange, and yellow, are only seen in the sky at the coolest hours of the day, and brown and yellow tints, in the foliage of England, prevail only in the spring and autumn. But he [Constable] fearlessly painted midsummer noon-day heat, with blues, greens, and grays forming the predominant masses. And he succeeded.’24

  Despite Ruskin, Constable’s stock was rising. John Charles and Minna had suspected that some visitors – aware of the increased value of his pictures – were ‘borrowing’ his works with no intention of returning them; James Brook Pulham, the son of a Constable patron, was a possible culprit. Moreover, fakes now began to appear. Charles Leslie wrote in 1843 to warn Francis Darby (who had bought two Hampstead paintings Constable had exhibited at the RA): ‘Constable’s pictures have so risen in value, that they are now eagerly sought for, and the consequence is there are many forgeries on the market, particularly of his small works, and it is dangerous for any one to buy a picture, professing to be his, unless they are sufficiently acquainted with his style.’25 Leslie thought that George Constable, brewer and amateur painter, was the author of some clumsy and ‘wretched imitations’ – and had no explanation of why the recent good friend would do this. A number of what Leslie’s son Robert called ‘extreme palette knife’ forgeries came to light in the 1840s, the paint still soft on them. Meanwhile, collectors of the real thing began to add to the inflationary impulse. Colonel James Lenox, the American who had in 1845 bought, via Leslie, Turner’s Staffa, Fingal’s Cave, three years later bought (with Leslie’s advice again) a small version of The Valley Farm. Lenox’s transatlantic lead was followed by John G. Johnson, J.P. Morgan, H.E. Huntington, Henry Clay Frick, and Andrew and Paul Mellon. Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows went for £600 in 1850. The White Horse fetched £630 in 1855. The Hay Wain was auctioned by Christie’s in 1866 and sold for £1,365 – a Benjamin West sort of price.26

  It wasn’t just millionaires; a wider public was discovering Constable through works exhibited in museums, particularly the National Gallery and the South Kensington Museum, later the Victoria and Albert, the ‘V&A’. The Ashmolean in Oxford acquired a Constable in 1855, and the Royal Academy began to show his work outside the exhibition season. At the same time writers – among them Tom Taylor, P.G. Hamerton and the Redgrave brothers – expressed in print the new awareness. Ruskin may have provoked some, and others were encouraged by Constable’s reputation in France. There, his gold-medal status still reverberated. The Barbizon painters couldn’t have managed without him. As for the Impressionists, to take one example Monet’s Hyde Park scenes were in his debt.27

  Isabel was the last of Constable’s children to die – unmarried and childless – in 1888, at the age of sixty-six, the same not very great age Minna had been when she died. Isabel had inherited the bulk of Minna’s and Lionel’s estates and was left with a large number of their father’s oils, watercolours, and drawings. She, Minna, and Lionel apparently agreed that the nation should be their heirs in this respect, and she gave the National Gallery six Constables and one of his palettes in 1887 and 88. (Henry Vaughan had also given it The Hay Wain in 1886.) The South Kensington Museum received what Isabel called ‘Landscape Sketches’ – ninety-two oils, 295 drawings and watercolours, and three sketchbooks. The British Museum got forty-seven drawings and watercolours and the Royal Academy fifteen oil studies. In her will Isabel bequeathed a further five paintings to the National Gallery: Scene on a Navigable River (Flatford Mill), The Cenotaph, The Glebe Farm, Hampstead Heath with a Rainbow, and Harwich Lighthouse. She left to the South Kensington Museum the oils Trees at Hampstead, Cottage in a Cornfield (which Constable had exhibited at the RA in 1833) and A Watermill at Gillingham, Dorset, together with the splendid watercolours of Old Sarum and Stonehenge. Visitors to London now had nearly 130 Constable oil paintings and some 350 drawings to look at, a far more generous collection of his work than had ever been seen. Two particular favourites for copyists were The Cornfield and Hampstead Heath with Harrow in the Distance – in 1891 the latter was the most copied ‘modern’ painting of the year. And Constable prices were still soaring. The White Horse went in 1894 for £6,510 to Agnews, who sold it to the banker J.P. Morgan. In 1895 Agnews bought Stratford Mill for £8,925 and Sir Samuel Montagu, another banker, acquired it from them.28

  Constable was bankable; indeed, in the public press he was finally – in the words of the London Standard – ‘a great man’. Scholarly writers, led by Charles Holmes, began to consider his works. The critic Julius Meier-Graefe, in his 1908 book Modern Art, struck what was to become a common chord when he named what he – like Delacroix – saw as the twin peaks of British Art: ‘Turner draped the inartisitic in the most enchanting robes, and Constable presented the artistic in the simplest guise.’ Meier-Graefe was reminded by Constable of some contemporary artists, including ‘the best of these, Manet’. The French connection
was still being made in 1937 when some sketches of Brighton beach by Constable led Kenneth Clark to think of Matisse.29

  Although by the early twentieth century Constable was everywhere – on fire screens and tea cosies, jigsaws and biscuit tins, mass-produced prints and posters – his fame required closer definition. There was on the one hand the Constable of Constable Country, of The Hay Wain and The White Horse, the artist whose Flatford had become a national shrine; but there was also the Constable of the clouds, the views from Hampstead and the deeper recesses of Fen Lane, a much more private, low-key painter. And by then taste was coming round to judging Constable’s sketches and studies as superior to the paintings he finished for exhibition. Meier-Graefe, Holmes, Clive Bell, and Roger Fry all agreed on this. Fry wished Constable had spent less time elaborating the great machines which he intended to make an effect at the Academy. Fry found the ‘real Constable’ in the full-size studies for the exhibition pictures. Meier-Graefe was content with Constable as an artist who had never fully established himself: ‘a quiet spirit’ who ‘never knew the glory of the conqueror’. This Constable ‘lacked the kindling quality of astounding personalities. His art … had that simplicity of perfection, which repels the public and the public’s painters … His gift attains the abstract purity of the scientific fact, and its benefits are so universal that the giver is scarcely remembered.’30