John Constable

by Anthony Bailey

If they had more income, they also soon had a new expense. Maria gave birth to a girl on 19 July. She was christened Maria Louisa on 20 August with her aunts Ann and Louisa as godmothers and John Fisher as godfather, a role he was to take seriously; her given names were replaced by a variety of pet names through childhood – Minna, Minny, Nummenum and Ladybird, among others. And they also had new worries: the first-born John Charles was weak, and Maria wasn’t springing back after the confinement. A ‘change of air’ was called for; Hampstead was proposed, a large village still in countryside, just outside the great wen. There was a good ten-a-day coach service into town. Anthony Spedding, Charles Bicknell’s legal partner, had a house in Hampstead17 and Constable had walked that way on several excursions with Thomas Stothard. For the next few months he rented Albion Cottage, on a road called Upper Heath, at the north end of the village. Hampstead had a reputation as a spa, with a ‘Vale of Health’ and springs, wells, and a pump room that Dr Johnson, Fanny Burney, and David Garrick had patronised. Many of the ponds on the Heath had been dug in Henry VIII’s time and since enlarged. The artists William Blake and John Linnell for a while lived close by – Blake contrarily used to complain about the fresh Hampstead air, so unlike the London smoke. And John Keats, the tubercular poet, had recently been lodging in Well Walk and Wentworth Place. Other writers followed, including Charles Dickens: members of the Pickwick Club were shortly to be treated to a lecture from their chairman entitled ‘Speculation on the Source of the Hampstead Ponds, with some Observations on the Theory of Tittlebats’.

  The new scene gave Constable new subject matter. From Hampstead southwards you could see London with the dome of St Paul’s on the horizon. From London – for example from his old lodgings in Charlotte Street – the hills of Hampstead were visible. He was soon out on the high ridge of the Heath, painting the ponds, the sheep and their shepherds, the treelined paths and the houses such as Mr Spedding’s to be glimpsed through the trees – and on those relative heights, taking new notice of the sky.

  Leaving Maria behind, he got to East Bergholt again in the autumn. Abram met him at Colchester and drove him home to Flatford in the gig. Never again East Bergholt House. Next morning he looked out on a world covered deeply in snow. After walking around the village he wrote immediately to Maria about the ravages done to the trees by the wind and weight of snow: ‘One would think there had been a battle of Waterloo in Mr Godfrey’s park, and the roads are impassable for the broken boughs & fallen trees.’ Abram and Mr Revans, his father’s elderly steward, brought him up to date on money matters, and Constable felt thankful: ‘How many comforts are within our reach – & should any thing happen to me, I should leave the world with the consolation that you & our darling angels would be above want …’ Following his old route to school, he walked down to Dedham to post the letter. A few days later he wrote to Maria again to describe how they had divided the family silver: ‘I have got the beautifull coffy pot and washer on which it stands – a pair of very noble candlesticks – a handsome soup ladle – & two gravy spoons – all of which were my Grandmother’s present to my Mother on her marriage.’ There was a good deal of linen if Maria felt they wanted it. Discussing ‘family matters’ had quite worn them all out, but the brothers and sisters (including Martha Whalley who had come up for the occasion) had got on very amicably.

  He returned to London and Hampstead on the eve of the election of Associates, in time to call on Farington. How stood his chances? On 23 August Thomas Phillips had told Farington that although Constable ‘had produced his best picture at the last Exhibition … he is still an artist unsettled in his practice’. To Constable, Phillips recommended the study of Turner’s Liber Studiorum in order ‘to learn how to make a whole’. Samuel Lane, the deaf portrait painter for whom Constable had been learning sign language, had called on Farington earlier in the day and agreed not to push his own claim – thus helping Constable’s chances. Farington declared that he had been telling Academicians they’d do best to consider the merits of ‘those who were of long standing in the Art’ – a plug for Constable. There were thirty-eight candidates, with only one place available for a painter and one for an engraver. In the preliminary balloting at a meeting thinly attended by full members of the Academy, Constable had a tight tussle with his new friend Charles Leslie, the good-natured American narrative painter. But in the final ballot he pulled ahead: the result was Constable eight, Leslie five. Perhaps ‘long standing’ finally paid off. Perhaps, as Farington told Constable’s father-in-law, it was also ‘a due acknowledgement of his professional ability’.18 The White Horse and becoming a director of the AGBI undoubtedly helped. Whatever – he had at last broken through the portcullis. He wrote to Abram the following day to let the family know of his success. From Salisbury the Fishers sent their congratulations, John Fisher writing on behalf of the Bishop as well to tell Constable he owed his place in the Academy ‘to no favour but solely to your own unsupported unpatronised merits. – I reckon it no small feather in my cap that I have had the sagacity to find them out.’ On 8 December Constable and Maria called in person on the RA secretary to acknowledge Farington’s assistance.

  Why had it taken so long? Richard Redgrave later recalled that although Constable could be ‘soft and amiable in speech, he yet uttered sarcasms which cut you to the bone’.19 Was it a defensive tactic he had learned at school, and never stopped deploying? Was he, like many inherently shy people, prone to fits of fierce outspokenness? He was fully aware of his sarcastic side and sullen moments, noting to Fisher on one occasion (8 May 1824), ‘a good deal of the devil is in me’. His friendship with Fisher (not a painter) lasted, but the friendships with the artists Reinagle, Haydon and William Collins did not. Collins in 1814 had been impressed enough by Constable to note in his journal: ‘Two days since Constable compared a picture to a sum, for it is wrong if you can take away or add any figure to it.’20 But quarrels and coolness followed, owing in part to Constable’s inability to curb that devil in him. In a letter to Fisher Constable mentioned Collins as ‘an unpleasant person’ he was minded to rid himself of. When Collins became a full Academician in 1820, well before Constable, he became – said Constable – ‘too great a man’. Constable was also outspoken in his belief that Collins painted works that were ‘too pretty to be natural’. Leslie thought Constable was unable to ‘conceal his opinions of himself and others; and what he said had too much point not to be repeated, and too much truth not to give offence’. Therefore ‘some of his competitors [NB competitors, not colleagues] hated him, and most were afraid of him. There was also that about him which led all who had not known him well and long to consider him an odd fellow, and a great egotist … But … he was not a selfish egotist.’21

  Constable rarely stopped to reflect before making a sharp rejoinder, particularly about his fellow artists. He thought Bonington’s ‘dash’ and ‘compleation’ were assumed without the necessary painful study.22 (Anyone might be jealous of Bonington’s dash.) Eastlake’s works, done in Italy and Greece, had ‘wonderful merit and so has watch-making’. When he was eventually an RA and a member of the Arrangement Committee, he upset a fellow Academician by telling him the frames of his pictures bulked too large. The painter, H.W. Pickersgill, defended himself by saying his frames were just like those the brilliant portraitist Sir Thomas Lawrence had used. Constable replied, ‘It is very easy to imitate Lawrence in his frames.’ He often failed to react with simple pleasure to a compliment. When William Blake looked at some Constable sketches and praised one of an avenue of trees in Hampstead, saying, truthfully, ‘This is not drawing but inspiration,’ Constable snapped, ‘I never knew it before. I took it for drawing.’23 When a pension for senior Academicians was being discussed, Constable said it would be no bad thing on condition they relinquished their easels. The critic Edward Dubois was often unfair and malicious in his reviews of Constable’s works but one can see the justice of his description of Constable as ‘a crab stick’.24

  Money, as suggested earl
ier, may have been a factor in the long delay in his recognition by the Academy. He seemed to many members too comfortably off, with no need to struggle – not that he saw himself that way. Moreover, he wasn’t a historical or literary artist like Wilkie, or even primarily a portrait painter; he was a landscape painter, and although educated taste was cottoning on to landscape,25 most RAs still saw it as ‘low art’. (Constable’s view of the Academicians was that they knew ‘as much about landscape as they do about the kingdom of heaven’.)26 And his landscapes weren’t exactly Claudes or Poussins: to many they seemed rough and ready, the handling too free, the finish unfinished.

  Finally, there was his prickly personality. He knew his approach was right. And possibly as a talented child he had got used to approbation, and thought he deserved nothing less. Perhaps too, after quitting Suffolk for London, he felt that he had known Eden, and was thereafter sulky at having lost it. Melancholy became a habit – the grumpy melancholy of one uprooted from a perfect place. That, at any rate, was his condition as an artist. As for the husband and father, he could for the moment bury himself in domestic activity and happiness in Keppel Street. Might it last for ever!

  8. All but the Clouds (1820–21)

  EARLY IN THE new year the old King died. The staff of the Royal Academy donned mourning clothes in honour of George III, the deceased founder and patron of their institution. Bishop Fisher in Salisbury was among many who felt someone close to them had departed. Benjamin West, the King’s exact contemporary, said he had lost his best friend – and died too, six weeks later. A cast of West’s painting hand, taken as if holding a brush, was made within an hour of his death, to mark his passing. Whatever his limitations as a painter, West – a celebrity – always encouraged younger artists, including Constable. Encountering him in the street one day in 1812, Constable asked whether West thought he was pursuing his studies so as to lay ‘the foundation of real excellence’. The RA President replied, ‘Sir, I consider you have achieved it.’1 Sir Thomas Lawrence, the fashionable portrait painter, succeeded West as President. George IV, nicknamed Prinny, even more of an art lover than Farmer George, was the new King.

  Constable seems to have been a straightforward monarchist and pro-Hanoverian. He took the fourth George’s part against his consort, Caroline, who had left the country as an outraged princess in 1813 and now returned to England to claim her rights as Queen. In July Parliament enacted a bill to deprive her of her title and dissolve the marriage. In London mobs roamed the streets in support of the Queen, demanding illuminations and breaking windows; soldiers had to keep the peace. On 1 September Constable wrote to Fisher from Keppel Street that he was glad he had got his wife and children out to Hampstead: ‘Things do not look well though I fear nothing – but the Royal Strumpet has a large party – in short she is the rallying point (and a very fit one) for all evil minded persons.’ She was also a rallying point for such important opposition figures as William Cobbett – a dangerous radical as far as Constable was concerned. Constable continued, ‘I hear the Duke of Wellington was yesterday in the most imminent danger – & had nearly lost his life by the hands of an Old Woman.’ For Constable, Wellington – barring the bad luck of assassination – was a trustworthy hero.

  An ‘old woman’ closer to the artist was one of his father’s sisters, Aunt Martha Smith, aged eighty and slowly declining in Nayland. Constable had been to see her a few months earlier and her eyes had filled with joyful tears when he told her of Minna’s birth and his happiness with Maria. In 1810 she had commissioned Constable to paint the altarpiece for Nayland church and now on her death in January 1820 she left him £400 as the promised payment for this.

  Stour scenes figured again in Constable’s Academy campaign of 1820. His two paintings showed the Stour, one upriver at Stratford St Mary, the other at its North Sea mouth. He had sketched children fishing by the Stratford watermill in 1811 and his painting now extended the view to more of the river, a barge and the meadow across the way. The water surface alternates between pools of shadow and reflection; the trees along the left-hand bank are similarly broken up, here sunlit, there in deep shade; the sky’s blue partly covered by stacks of white cloud. As with The White Horse, Constable made a full-size sketch as well as painting his six-footer for Somerset House, and to present taste the sketch is (as with most of his six-footers) livelier than the finished product; in the latter the pains taken seem to reduce the spontaneity and energy. Energy, of course, is part of the subject. A watermill with its side-mounted wheel may now appear merely a picturesque element in a sylvan landscape. But in that time mills – water or wind-powered – worked machinery for grinding, sawing, pumping and pressing. Stratford Mill then made oil (Constable tells us so on the back of a little oil sketch he painted in 1811). Thereafter it was used for the production of paper and macaroni. It would not have seemed as ‘picturesque’ to Constable as to us.

  Before sending it in, Constable told Farington he didn’t mean to ‘consult opinions’ about the painting.2 Was he fearful that Farington might talk him into changes he’d regret? Later that year Farington succeeded in convincing Constable to put aside his newly begun painting of the opening of Waterloo Bridge for another big Stour picture. In any event, Stratford Mill was a success at the RA exhibition. It was noticed flatteringly by The Examiner, which dared to brave ‘the jealousy of some professors and of some exclusive devotees of the Old Masters’ by saying that Constable’s picture ‘has a more exact look of nature than any picture we have ever seen by an Englishman’.3 Constable was pleased: viewers were responding to the way he saw landscape. His second, smaller picture (based on a drawing of 1815) showed the lighthouse at Harwich, a sparer, less cluttered and possibly to modern eyes lovelier scene.

  Stratford Mill also succeeded in acquiring a buyer, the faithful John Fisher. Early in 1821 he won a court case and bought the picture for one hundred guineas to give to his Salisbury lawyer, John Tinney. Tinney became an ardent fan: he tried to buy at least one further large Constable and several smaller ones, and he put up with frequent requests from the artist to send back Stratford Mill to be exhibited or improved or simply to rest in Constable’s studio once more. Constable, despite having been paid for it, seemed to think it still rightly belonged there, sitting on an easel and impressing visitors. Poor Tinney had to keep asking for the return of his picture. He was taken advantage of until his patience snapped. He had wanted another work from Constable, but Constable masochistically refused to paint one. Tinney’s wants were a burden to him. Constable wrote to Fisher (17 November 1824), ‘I am now free & independent of Tinney’s kind & friendly commissions – these things only harrass me. You know my disposition is this – in my seeming meekness, if I was bound with chains I would break them – and – if I felt a single hair round me I should feel uncomfortable.’ A lot of Constable’s self-acknowledged obduracy is evident here.

  At the new King’s birthday dinner in Somerset House on 3 July Sir Thomas Lawrence, the new President, was in the chair at the centre of the long table. Collins was at one end and Turner at the other, with Constable and Samuel Lane to his right. (Farington did a diagram in his diary of the seating arrangements.)4 Constable conversed as well as he could with Lane, using sign language; with Turner he had to cope with the great man’s grunts, sybillic utterances and occasional bursts of brilliance – it helped to be able to hook into Turner’s streams of associated thoughts. Constable and Turner – linked by posterity as the twin masters of nineteenth-century British art – were never friends. Constable said of Turner’s Hannibal in 1812 that he found it ‘scarcely intelligible in many parts’ and yet as a whole ‘novel and affecting’. A year later, in 1813, he dined beside Turner in the RA Council Room with various other exhibitors and, as already noted, wrote to Maria that ‘I always expected to find him what I did – he is uncouth but has a wonderfull range of mind.’ Given that both men were at the forefront of the movement to paint landscape out of doors, both believed poetry and painting were closely connec
ted, both had friends in common like Leslie and heroes in common like Claude – and both were commonly attacked by such critics as John Eagles and were in the end applauded together by Delacroix – it is strange how problematic their acquaintanceship was.5 Constable put on record more compliments about Turner’s work than Turner did of his, Constable referring for example to Turner’s ‘golden visions’ in a letter to Fisher in 1828. But he undoubtedly suffered from working so long in Turner’s shadow. His envy of Turner’s success sometimes showed, as when he called Turner’s book of mezzotint engravings the ‘Liber Stupidorum’. Possibly there were temperamental and even political differences between the more ruthless unmarried London-born artist whose father had been a barber and the Suffolk grain-merchant’s son who had married the daughter of an Admiralty lawyer.

  In July 1820 Constable took Maria, John Charles, and Minna to Salisbury to stay with John and Mary Fisher for six weeks. The archdeacon now had one vicarage in Osmington and another at Gillingham, west of Salisbury, as well as Leydenhall his large house in the cathedral close. The cathedral with its great spire, the highest in England according to Defoe, overlooked the well-endowed community of ecclesiastics; and the Constables didn’t complain at being guests there. The White Horse was in the Fishers’ drawing room, hung – Fisher had told the artist in late April – ‘on a level with the eye, the lower frame resting on the ogee: in a western side light, right for the light of the picture, opposite the fireplace. It looks magnificently. My wife says that she carries her eye from the picture to the garden & back again & observes the same sort of look in both.’ Fisher and Constable made sketching trips near and far: down the garden to the River Avon; across the water meadows to West Harnham and the low downs of Harnham Ridge beyond, with its prospect of Salisbury and the cathedral; to Gillingham with its quaint bridge and mill; to the megaliths of Stonehenge; and to Old Sarum, the loaf-shaped hill which had been the site of a fortified camp in earlier times and was still a prime rotten example of parliamentary corruption, being a barely populated ‘borough’ with the right to send two MPs to the House of Commons (Cobbett called it ‘the Accursed Hill’).6 Constable drew and painted both close-at-hand and panoramic views, some with rich detail, others done with quick touches. In one of the sketchbooks the archdeacon wrote down a translation of some Latin lines which Constable later used in the text for a mezzotint of East Bergholt House: