Sir George may have asked Constable if he noticed how Italian the scene was – not exactly biblical! But Sir George’s enthusiasm for his little picture must have been the primary thing demonstrated. Constable should note how Claude – the son of a pastry cook from a place near Nancy, in France – had split up the painting, with the foreground a dark green-brown, the middle distance a lighter green and the background a hazy blue. The sun blazed at the viewer; the trees made a feathery frame. The two small figures were posed stagily, with Hagar in her bright blue dress leaning back in alarm, startled by the angel whose wings looked as if they were stage props. The hilltop town, the lake, the river, the bridge and a man rowing a small boat – not at all like the Stour, though some similar elements may have sparked recognition with Constable. What atmosphere!
The little painting had a lifelong effect on Constable. He later copied Hagar and the Angel several times. One example of the master’s influence was visible in a weak sepia sketch Constable made soon after seeing the work, but it was not for some seven years that Claude’s impact truly made itself felt with the Dedham Vale of 1802 – an enchanted landscape. The introduction to Claude would have been reason enough for Constable to be for ever grateful to Beaumont, but the baronet continued to play a part in Constable’s life, not least by the love of paintings he plainly radiated. Yet the celebrated art lover had his blind side: he never appreciated Turner’s genius and he didn’t seem to understand what he was dealing with in Constable. No real patronage was offered apart from one small commission in 1823, which a then overworked Constable declined. The young man from East Anglia was always a potential protegé, but Beaumont’s commitment remained a social one, with an element of condescension to his mother’s friend’s son – a country relationship, of the sort a superior being might enjoy with an inferior.12
Right then it would have taken a leap of vision to detect a future master in the student artist. He copied in an exercise book a number of grotesque heads from Lavater’s Physiognomy. An early attempt at landscape, A Country Road, was perhaps sketched during a 1794 tour to Norfolk he made with one of his father’s clerks. He went on working for his father while in his spare time painting alongside Dunthorne and studying what he hoped were the right books. In October 1796, as the evenings once again grew longer, he was deep in Count Algarotti’s Essay on Painting and Leonardo’s Treatise. These texts had been suggested to him while staying with an aunt and uncle in Edmonton, on the northern outskirts of London. Thomas Allen, a brewer married to Ann Constable’s sister Jane, was like many of John Constable’s relations in what might be called well-to-do trade. The Constables’ idea seems to have been to expose John to useful contacts in the grain business but the immediate effect at the Allens was to introduce him to their friend John Thomas Smith. Smith was a portrait painter, engraver, author, teacher, and collector of antiquities, who became Keeper of Prints at the British Museum.
When Constable later pledged that all that lay on the banks of the Stour made him a painter he told only a partial and somewhat identity-enhancing truth. What also made him a painter was stimulation received from suburban London – from Thomas Allen, a scholar as well as a brewer, and from friends of the Allens interested in the arts and antiquities. Among these were J.T. Smith and the painter John Cranch. For a while Smith (1766–1833) played Polonius to Constable’s Hamlet. He was ten years older, a native of the city born in a London hackney carriage, who claimed to have been patted on the head as a child by Dr Johnson. He loved talking about art. He took Constable around in London and suggested Algarotti and Leonardo to him for reading. He also got Constable to do artistic chores for him, seeking out picturesque rural scenes and copying prints. Smith was particularly interested in decayed cottages covered with mossy thatch. Where Sir George Beaumont had held out glimpses of the Golden Age in the form of enchanted palaces, Smith offered raggle-taggle rustic dwellings in which even Marie-Antoinette’s ladies would have struggled to keep their shepherdess clothes clean. John Cranch was likewise into the picturesque, picturing interiors of cottages showing homespun activities. (He achieved a fleeting celebrity for his painting of the death of the tragic young poet Chatterton.) Cranch also gave Constable a list of books he should read – not just Leonardo and Algarotti, but de Piles, the Richardsons, Hogarth and Reynolds, whose Discourses were essential reading. Cranch told Constable: ‘The “Discourses” are a work of unquestionable genius … They go … to establish an aristocracy in painting.’ However, Cranch thought quite smartly that Reynolds had led many students ‘into a contempt of everything but grandeur and Michael Angelo: the force … with which the precepts are inculcated, makes us forget that the truth of Teniers and the wit and moral purposes of Hogarth have been, and will for ever be, at least as useful’. Cranch’s painting skills were also made to serve as a learning tool. Constable wrote to Smith in November 1796 to say that he had just painted ‘a small moonlight’ in Cranch’s manner; this showed gypsies camped at night round a fire near Hadleigh church.13
If not a gypsy’s, an artist’s life beckoned the twenty-year-old Constable while in London. His father – perhaps beginning to suspect his son’s commitment to the family business – reproved him for a hastily scribbled letter. John replied affecting to set Golding Constable right on what he saw as an error. He didn’t want a job in town other than for the purpose of learning a business like his father’s and this might be of service to both of them. In fact, this reply was disingenuous; although part of John Constable felt Suffolk – his Suffolk – was the necessary framework of existence, part sought a new world. He loved his family and the security it provided. He was also repelled by the loving confinement created by parents and siblings, by knowing how his mother and father would react to any question. Like many a young man before him, he wanted to stay and he wanted to escape.
Although Constable went back from Edmonton to East Bergholt, and set to work in his father’s office, his mind was only half on the job. Constable tried to get J.T. Smith to lobby on his behalf. He wrote to Smith in March 1797: ‘My dear Friend, I must now take your advise and attend to my Father’s business, as we are likely soon to lose an old servant (our Clark) … And now I certainly see it will be my lot to walk through life in a path contrary to that which my inclination would lead me.’ He clearly hoped that Smith would support his artistic leanings. But Smith – also got at by Constable’s mother – seems to have hedged his bets, promoting loyalty to the family while conducting a correspondence art course with Constable. Smith sent books and prints which Constable should copy and encouraged the young man in his first clumsy attempts at etching. Another educational venture proposed by Smith was for Constable to find out for him details of Gainsborough’s life; Constable said he would ride over to Sudbury, Gainsborough’s birthplace, for that purpose. He was also put to work collecting suitable subject matter – ramshackle cottages preferred – for a book Smith was putting together, Remarks on Rural Scenery. Constable seemed to enjoy the growing sense of an art world to be explored, to be touched, with luck to be immersed in. He wrote to Smith to say he believed the present Royal Academy exhibition was very good, and, proud to mention an artist he knew personally, ‘I understand Sir G. Beaumont excels.’
As the publication date of Smith’s book got closer, Constable acted out of gratitude to find subscribers for it at half a guinea a copy. Friends were pestered, among them the amateur artist and banker’s wife Mrs Elizabeth Cobbold in Ipswich and the attractive Miss Lucy Hurlock in Dedham; local acquaintances were signed up, including the poet Robert Bradstreet in Higham and Ben Strutt, a collector in Colchester; relatives were waylaid for their ten shillings and sixpence – Constable’s sister Martha Whalley subscribed as did his cousin James Gubbins and his uncle David Pike Watts. Constable himself put his name down for two copies. Remarks on Rural Scenery appeared on 13 July 1797 – Bonaparte’s armies had just outmanoeuvred the Italian and Austrian Armies while the British Navy, the nation’s great deterrence against the French, had
been paralysed by mutinies at Spithead and the Nore. Smith’s work now seems a dusty enough little volume plugging the picturesque, but it serves as a footnote to what interested Constable at the time and as a memento of his pupillage with Smith. (Constable had apparently already been reading William Gilpin’s influential essay On Picturesque Beauty.) Smith offered some practical advice: a painter had no need to invent figures for a landscape when real people would make better models; and he should try to imitate the colours of nature as realistically as possible, studying closely the innumerable degrees of green and noting how natural objects partook of the colours around them, a doctrine Constable heeded. Fondness for a particular locality he took for granted. He was now putting Smith’s advice into practice with John Dunthorne and also with an amateur drawing master from Ipswich, George Frost, whose day job for fifty years was clerking for the Blue Coach firm, which ran services to and from London.14
Smith pleased Mrs Constable by praising her son, but she deftly deflected his compliments, saying that if Smith knew her husband he wouldn’t wonder that they had such a son. Indeed, she counted on seeing John back in Bergholt soon and hoped he would then ‘attend to business – by which means he will please his Father, and ensure his own respectability, comfort & accommodation’. But it was Smith, who visited East Bergholt in the autumn of 1798, whose influence and leverage seemed to count. Constable drove him over to see Mrs Cobbold, subscriber to Smith’s Remarks and another, if unpaid, believer in Constable’s artistic promise. All things seemed to be suddenly conspiring in favour of the path he was really inclined to take. Abram had just turned sixteen and was willing to work in the family business. At Mrs Cobbold’s on 29 January 1799 Constable met a well-connected Quaker lady from Tottenham, Priscilla Wakefield. In her diary she described him as ‘a pleasing modest young man – who had a natural genius for painting’. And she furnished him with a letter of introduction to Joseph Farington, the secretary of the Royal Academy of Arts – a man with power to open the magic doors. Mrs Constable allowed her hopes for John’s respectability to be temporarily put aside. Mr Constable agreed that John could go to London with a small allowance, to study art. The young man might have put it more definitely: he was going to town ‘to become a painter’.15
fn1 Later readers trying to decipher Constable’s adult correspondence may have wished he had kept up those skills.
2. A Hero in Distress (1799–1802)
JOHN CONSTABLE SIGNALLED his success in a joyful letter to John Dunthorne in early March 1799. He wrote from 23 Cecil Street, off the Strand: ‘I am this morning admitted a student at the Royal Academy; the figure which I drew for admittance was the Torso … I shall begin painting as soon as I have the loan of a sweet little picture by Jacob Ruysdael to copy.’
Saying this, he was getting ahead of himself. Farington, regarded by some as Dictator of the Royal Academy, had looked at Constable’s rural sketches and introduced him to Joseph Wilton, the elderly Keeper. Classical art still set the fashion, and drawing the Belvedere Torso was the standard challenge set for would-be students. Constable, coming up to twenty-three years old, had been admitted as a Probationer, not yet a full-fledged student; but he was allowed to use the Antique Academy, full of plaster casts of ancient statuary, and did so until the end of the Academy year. He went to anatomy lessons, drew from the casts and – continuing to teach himself the techniques of painting – made copies not only of Ruysdael but of Poussin and Claude. He shared rooms with another young hopeful, Richard Ramsay Reinagle. Reinagle was not an RA student but a pupil of his father, who was an associate of the Academy and a skilful copyist of old masters. Constable went looking for art he could find publicly on view – sparser in those days, before great museums. Loyalty, if not simple curiosity, took him to Old Bond Street to see an object John Cranch was exhibiting, admittance half a crown. This was not a painting but ‘an old, rusty, fusty head, with a spike in it’, that Cranch, one of three partners who owned it, declared to be ‘the real embalmed head of Oliver Cromwell’. A change from the Belvedere Torso.1
Constable returned to East Bergholt for the summer holiday and in mid-August was sketching in the countryside near Ipswich. He wrote from there to J.T. Smith, the mentor with whom he was still in touch, ‘It is a most delightful country for a painter. I fancy I see Gainsborough in every hedge and hollow tree.’ Constable made no secret of his heroes and their pull on him. When Richard Ramsay Reinagle came up to Suffolk to visit him, the weather was wet and they walked to Dedham to sketch the flooded fields. (Reinagle’s painting, Dedham in Flood, was shown at the Academy in 1801.) Reinagle, a year older than his fellow lodger, was also taken to meet some young ladies of the neighbourhood who admired the handsome young miller who wanted to be an artist. Among these was Miss Lucy Hurlock, daughter of the Reverend Brooke Hurlock, rector of Lamarsh, who also stood in as curate for the absentee rector of Langham, close to Dedham, Dr John Fisher. We don’t know whether it was again Constable’s mother’s skill at drawing useful people into her son’s ken that functioned here, or whether it was simply a warm glance from Miss Hurlock. But in a fateful, knock-on way, through the Hurlocks young Constable met Dr Fisher, whose primary post at this point was as a canon at Windsor. Dr Fisher was also an amateur artist and art devotee; he was acquainted with the King; he had a London townhouse, in Seymour Street, and pretty soon he too was taking an active interest in Constable’s career.
The daughters of a dissenting minister and engraver named Taylor who had recently moved from Colchester joined the number of Constable’s feminine fans. The Taylors were renting a small house in Dedham from Golding Constable. Ann Taylor – later known as a writer of verse for children and in particular of ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ – went over to East Bergholt in December 1799 hoping to see the paintings of the young man she’d heard so much about and with luck the young man in person. Rumours which had reached her ‘conferred upon him something of the character of a hero in distress’. Constable’s father, she understood, wanted ‘to confine him to the drudgery of his own business – that of a miller. To us this seemed unspeakably barbarous, though in Essex and Suffolk a miller was commonly a man of considerable property, and lived as Mr Constable did, in genteel style.’
Mr Constable in fact was continuing to give his second son every chance to prove his mettle. He had allowed John to use a spare bedroom in East Bergholt House as a studio and soon let him have the small but more self-contained Moss Cottage, with a twenty-five-foot by twelve-foot upstairs room to paint in, just up the street. Mrs Constable seemed equally inclined to be unbarbarous and when the Taylor girls called one December morning they found her at home, ‘a shrewd-looking, sensible woman’. Ann Taylor later recalled the meeting: ‘There we were, five girls, all “Come to see Mr John Constable’s paintings”, and as we were about to be shown up into his studio, she turned and said dryly, “Well, young ladies, would you like to go up all together to my son, or one at a time?” I was simpleton enough to pause for a moment, in doubt, but we happily decided upon going en masse.’
Ann Taylor said nothing about the young hero’s paintings, but she noted that in one respect Constable lived up to romantic expectation: ‘So finished a model of what is reckoned manly beauty I never met with.’2
Mrs Constable used to go up to London to visit her many relatives at least once a year; the relatives came down to Suffolk in return. As noted, the extended family in London included Constable’s sister Martha, her husband Nathaniel, and their children, at 15 America Square in the Minories, and they frequently invited him for a meal and cheerful company. Ann Constable generally brought to town East Bergholt gossip and hampers of Suffolk food (such as turkeys), took her son’s shirts home for mending, and left him plenty of good advice. She trusted he would avoid debt, ‘that earthly Tartarus’ – she probably had in mind Golding Constable’s brother-in-law, the MP Christopher Atkinson, who had swindled the army while a victualling contractor and been expelled from the House of Commons for perjury. If
John had to become a painter, she hoped he would create masterpieces that would ‘be nothing short of perfection’.
Johnny, as his younger sister Mary continued to call him, had moved soon from Cecil Street to 52 Upper Norton Street, off the Portland Road. His rooms-sharing arrangement with Reinagle hadn’t lasted long. In later years Reinagle claimed to have been instrumental in getting Constable started as a painter. Reinagle was evidently eloquent and personable, had studied abroad, and with his family background in the art business and metropolitan sophistication won the young Suffolk man’s confidence. Moreover, the portrait of Constable (now in the National Portrait Gallery) that he painted around this time does a skilful job of conveying Constable’s moodiness. Constable repaid the compliment with a portrait of Reinagle, though soon after he let the portrait painter John Hoppner paint over it in return for help Hoppner had given him with a picture. Obviously it wasn’t a treasure Constable wanted to keep. As in many such acquaintanceships formed when two young hopefuls meet, cracks had quickly appeared. Constable’s growing sense of vocation came up against the wheeler-dealing attitude of his friend. Instructed by Reinagle père, whose ‘restoration’ of old paintings raised troublesome questions, Reinagle’s eight sisters apparently copied sections of old masters without the permission of the owners and touched up the oil paint they used with watercolours. Thus they worked very quickly. Farington recorded their comment: ‘Picture painted one day – sold the next – money spent the third.’3
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