This spot saw the day spring of my life,
Years of happiness and days of Joy.
This place first tinged my boyish fancy
With a love of the art.
This place was the origin of my fame.
But the countryside had more distant views than Suffolk’s, and the skies got his attention differently. He stood just outside the gateway to Fisher’s house and looked across the lush green meadow to the grey-white cathedral spire rising some four hundred feet out of the old trees to brush the clouds: Heaven-aspiring – on a far grander scale than Dedham. When the Constables returned to London in late August, Fisher reminded his friend to paint the eclipse forecast for 7 September. He seemed to know that skies were going to be an increasing part of Constable’s agenda.
Constable sent Maria and the two children up to Hampstead while he attended the life classes at the RA and got on with several paintings. He worked again on his ‘Waterloo Bridge’, which Fisher was encouraging. He made a copy of a Claude for Fisher and painted Leydenhall’s garden and made a sketch of the Cathedral for a picture Bishop Fisher wanted. Wonderful patrons, the Fishers, though the relationship involved having to give ‘the good Bishop’s’ daughter Dorothea copying tips and tolerating the senior Fisher’s quirks. On 3 January 1821 the archdeacon wrote to Constable about the commissioned work: ‘The Bishop likes your picture – “all but the clouds” he says. He likes “a clear blue sky”.’ Constable also had orders for portraits and house-portraits piling up (they included Lady Dysart, the Reverend Thomas Walker – the chaplain of Lincoln’s Inn – and Henry Greswolde of Malvern Hall.)7 Meanwhile, Farington argued that Constable should work on another full-size Stour painting rather than the Waterloo Bridge.8 Part of him was already there on the Essex–Suffolk border: in what was already a very productive year he found time to complete another version of one of his favourite Stour valley subjects, Dedham Mill and Church.
Archdeacon Fisher had several shocks in February 1821. His mother-in-law died suddenly. Then, while in the graveyard discussing with the elderly clerk of Osmington church where she should be buried, the old man exclaimed, ‘I cannot stand, sir!’ and fell dead into Fisher’s arms. When Constable heard of this he wrote to his friend, ‘The poor clerk’s sudden death … must have called for a great exertion of your fortitude and piety.’ He went on to tell Fisher about what obviously meant more to him: the friendship and approbation that kept him going when standing – as he was these days – before a large canvas. ‘I shall never be a popular artist – a Gentlemen and Ladies painter but … your hand stretched forth teaches me to value my own natural dignity of mind above all things.’ Fisher had cheered up three weeks later when he wrote to Constable from Salisbury about Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne. ‘It is a book that should delight you & be highly instructive to you in your art if you are not already acquainted with it. White was the clergyman of the Place & occupied himself with narrowly observing & noting down all the natural occurrences that came within his view: and this for a number of years … It is in your own way of close natural observation: & has in it that quality that to me constitutes the great pleasure of your society.’ Fisher recognised that, like White, Constable had his own specific locale; he painted his own places best.
Constable went at once to Bond Street, to his friend the bookseller James Carpenter, and bought Selborne, first published in 1789. He wrote to Fisher, ‘The single page alone of the Life of Mr White leaves a more lasting impression on my mind than that of Charles the fifth or any other renowned hero – it shows what a real love for nature will do – surely the serene & blameless life of Mr White, so different from the folly & quackery of the world, must have fitted him for such a clear & intimate view of nature … This book is an addition to my estate.’ Twelve years later Selborne was also put into the hands of his son John Charles, who was given his own copy.9
In Hampstead another addition to the Constable estate had just arrived – ‘a beautiful boy’, born on 29 March and christened Charles Golding Constable, after both his grandfathers. According to Constable, Maria had grown ‘unusually large’ this time, but the delivery went well, with Dr Robert Gooch in attendance. Maria was averaging nearly one child a year.
Constable had been working on four entries for the RA annual exhibition: Hampstead Heath, A Shower, Harrow and Landscape: Noon, which was to become known after the most prominent object in it as The Hay Wain. This was his big offering for the exhibition and he had been keeping the archdeacon (and Farington) informed about it. But earlier in the year he had realised that he needed some details about its central feature: the four-wheeled farm wagon, or ‘wain’, which at a late stage he had decided to introduce. The empty wagon was on its way through the shallow millstream to the ford by which it would cross the main river channel, heading for the meadows where haymakers were at work. A fisherman (or boy fishing under a man’s hat) was on the far bank among the grass and reeds, where the bows of a boat could be seen. Perhaps because of the constraints Maria had put on his friendship with John Dunthorne, Constable asked Abram to get Dunthorne’s son Johnny to draw him the ‘outlines of a scrave or harvest wagon’. Johnny, now twenty-three, had a cold job doing this out of doors in February, but according to Abram, Dunthorne Senior – now fifty-one, and with a hernia problem – ‘urged him forward saying he was sure you must want it as the time drew near fast’. Johnny was apparently doing this ‘free from sordid motives’, i.e. without pay, but Abram said he would hand on any recompense Constable cared to give him. At the time in February Abram was ‘extremely apprehensive’ about the state of the painting and thought his brother still had ‘everything to do’ to get it ready by 10 April, when it was to go to Somerset House. And when William Collins saw Landscape: Noon on 9 April, he said he liked it but regretted that Constable had lacked ‘time to enable him to finish the picture more accurately’.10 The sashes of a window on the stairs at Keppel Street had to be removed to get the painting out. When Farington went to the Academy on 1 May, one of the varnishing days, he saw Constable at work putting in final touches. He signed the painting ‘John Constable pinxt London 1821’.
Constable went up to Bergholt in mid-April, leaving Maria, the two older children and the newborn. He took a parcel of hot-cross buns as an Easter gift and told Maria his old haunts were ‘sweet and beautiful’. The trees and blossom were coming out, and swallows were appearing. At the Whalleys’, he felt the urge to live in Dedham too. ‘Here is so much entertainment to be found for the children, & if I was absent you would be near Martha.’ But he encountered his sister Ann in Bergholt in a prickly mood and thought her companion unpleasant. Maria had her own family problems. Her brother Sam died from consumption on 22 May and her sister Catherine had ‘many bad symptoms’, and looked likely to follow him (she died about four years later).
Then it was into the fray at Somerset House, into what Fisher called ‘the crowded copal atmosphere of the Exhibition: which is always to me like a great pot of boiling varnish’. Constable was pleased with his big landscape, though unusually for him with a new painting he didn’t claim it as his best to date. He told Fisher it wasn’t ‘so grand’ as Stratford Mill, ‘the masses not being so impressive – the power of the Chiaro Oscuro is lessened – but it has rather a more novel look than I expected’. And several critics were enthusiastic. Robert Hunt in The Examiner said that Landscape: Noon approached ‘nearer to the actual look of rural nature than any modern landscape whatever’. The Observer thought it deserved a high place and admired the ‘fine freshness’ of its colouring, and Bell’s Weekly Messenger approved but added, ‘Why all that excess of piebald scambling [sic] in the finishing, as if a plasterer had been at work …? The Artist may say, “I intend what I paint always to be viewed at a certain distance, you will then get rid of my white spots.” This is certainly an affectation and trickery of art unknown to our best painters.’11 What one saw as Constable’s ‘sparkle’ was to another Constable’s ‘spottiness’ – and
in time more would be heard on that score.
Among the visitors to the Academy exhibition were two from France: Théodore Géricault, one of the leaders of the French avantgarde, and the writer-critic Charles Nodier. Géricault, who had brought The Raft of the Medusa to exhibit privately in London, was overwhelmed by The Hay Wain. And Nodier mentioned only one painting in an essay he wrote on his trip to Britain:
The palm of the exhibition belongs to a large landscape by Constable, with which the ancient or modern masters have very few masterpieces that could be put in opposition. Near, it is only broad daubings of ill-laid colours, which offend the touch as well as the sight, they are so coarse and uneven. At the distance of a few steps it is a picturesque country, a rustic dwelling, a low river whose little waves foam over the pebbles, a cart crossing a ford: It is water, air, and sky; it is Ruysdael, Wouvermans or Constable.12
No one bought the painting at Somerset House. Constable exhibited it again at the British Institution in January 1822 with a price of 150 guineas; it was seen by a French art dealer with a British name, John Arrowsmith, who went to Keppel Street to call on Constable and offer him £70 for the painting, ‘without the frame’. The artist said no to this, though he claimed he needed the money ‘dreadfully’. Whether Abram was having difficulties paying sums due to family members because of the prevailing agricultural depression, we don’t know, but Constable’s friend and major patron John Fisher was also strapped. Constable said the painting of The Hay Wain had impoverished him and asked his friend to lend him twenty or thirty pounds – Fisher sent five pounds, all he could afford. The archdeacon also took Constable along in early June to sketch while he visited rural deaneries. What Maria thought about being left with the new baby and two small children, while Constable took this fortnight-long working holiday, we have to assume; judging from later, similar occasions, her patience wasn’t infinite; on the other hand, perhaps she was now grateful not to be bothered in bed by her loving husband. Fortunately she had to assist her a ‘treasure’, a nurse/governess/family-help named Elizabeth Roberts – nicknamed ‘Bobs’ or ‘Old Lady Ribbons’ – whose devotion to the Constables was demonstrated over many years.13
Yet Constable always missed home terribly and came back repenting his absence. He quickly decided Maria needed country air again – having been stuck in Keppel Street – and it was briefly back to Hampstead, to a house in Lower Terrace rented for four guineas a week, furnished. He wrote to Fisher on 3 November: ‘The last day of Octr was indeed lovely so much so that I could not paint for looking – my wife was walking with me all the middle of the day on the beautifull heath.’ Out on the Heath he found a new subject for painting, but he also now had to address a number of traditional chores. He was commissioned to paint an altarpiece for the church in Manningtree, a few miles east of Bergholt, where the Stour opens out into an estuary; it was ‘a job’ that would help meet the expenses of his expanding family and two homes. Salisbury continued to vie with the Stour, however, and in early November when his family was moving down to Keppel Street he joined Fisher again for a week or so, drawing the cathedral and the close, and visiting Winchester with its cathedral. Compared to Salisbury, he found it ‘more impressive but not so beautifull’. And he wrote to Maria with his passionate regrets: ‘Kiss my darlings … I am quite home sick (perhaps love sick) … I am uncomfortable away so long.’
Back in Keppel Street he worked on his next painting for Somerset House, a six-footer; it was a view on the Stour centred on some barges being moved just below the footbridge at Flatford. Farington was one of his chief supporters in this field – he felt big Stour pictures should be Constable’s way ahead – but on the penultimate day of 1821 the ‘Dictator’ of the Academy ceased to matter. Descending from the gallery of a church near Manchester he fell and died. Farington was therefore not available to support Constable’s candidacy for full RA membership in February 1822, when one place went to Richard Cook (who had given up exhibiting three years before but married well) and another to William Daniell whose uncle was the Academician Thomas Daniell. Literally nepotism.
9. Skying (1821–22)
DESPITE HIS CONCERN for his friend’s artistic success, John Fisher could be as self-absorbed and demanding as Constable. In August 1821 Fisher had decided that he needed a boat, to use on the Avon at the foot of Leydenhall garden. The obvious thing was to find one locally, new or second-hand, but Fisher reckoned it wouldn’t be too much of a chore for Constable to arrange the purchase. After all, he was a river man by birth and could find the right boat for him on the Thames. So Constable obligingly sent Fisher sketches of various types of small craft. He also went to some boatbuilders near Westminster Bridge and fixed on a sixteen-foot rowing skiff, price twenty-five guineas, including oars. At which point Fisher decided he didn’t have the money. Constable, in any event, had enough to do. Downtown he had rented a room from a glazier to use as a studio, where he was working on a large picture, presumably a preliminary study for A View on the Stour. In Hampstead he had also cleaned out the coal, mops and brooms from a shed at Lower Terrace for use as ‘a place of refuge’. Although Maria was ‘placid and contented’, and Mrs Roberts was now nurse and governess, two small children and a baby in the house created a zone of turmoil that could envelop the artist. The best refuge of all – the best place to get some sketching done – was out of doors, on the Heath.
At the end of summer and in the early autumn he frequently walked on to the Heath and looked upwards, then to his sketching paper pinned to the lid of his paintbox, again and again, drawing and painting. He wrote to Fisher on 20 September to say that he had ‘made many skies and effects … We have had noble clouds & effects of light & dark & color.’ He would have liked it said of himself, ‘as Fuseli says of Rembrandt, “he followed nature in her calmest abodes and could pluck a flower on every hedge – yet he was born to cast a stedfast eye on the bolder phenomena of nature.”’ And again, on 23 October: ‘I have done a good deal of skying … That Landscape painter who does not make his skies a very material part of his composition … neglects to avail himself of one of his greatest aids.’ Constable wasn’t the first artist to note this. Willem van de Velde the Younger, of the father-and-son team of marine painters who moved from Holland to England, used to have an old Thames waterman take him out on the Thames in all weathers, to study the sky. William Gilpin wrote: ‘These expeditions Vanderveldt called, in his Dutch manner of speaking, going a-skoying.’1 Charles Leslie said Van de Velde also used to go up to Hampstead Heath to observe the weather.2 Turner often walked out into the open and lay on the ground, looking up at the sky. Constable was therefore part of a tradition of painters taking supposedly picturesque elements and looking at them in naturalistic detail, defining their changes and differences. He looked harder and more precisely than most. And he noted that this knowledge would affect the complete painting. Constable continued his 23 October letter to Fisher by quoting Sir Joshua Reynolds on landscapes by Titian, Salvator Rosa, and Claude: ‘“Even their skies seem to sympathise with the Subject.” ’ Constable went on, ‘Certainly if the Sky is obtrusive – (as mine are) it is bad, but if they are evaded (as mine are not) it is worse, they must and always shall with me make an effectual part of the composition … The sky is the “source of light” in nature – and governs every thing.’
Perhaps he felt a bit guilty about this new obsession. Did Hampstead skies challenge his old watery loyalties? He told Fisher (in the same letter) that he had imagined himself with his friend on a recent trip which Fisher had made to fish in the New Forest. ‘But the sound of water escaping from Mill dams [moves me]’ – he omitted some words in his enthusiasm – ‘so do Willows, Old rotten Banks, slimy posts, & brickwork. I love such things … As long as I do paint I shall never cease to paint such Places.’ He would have been delighted to be with Fisher on his Hampshire river: ‘But I should paint my own places best – Painting is but another word for feeling. I associate my “careless boyhood” to all that lies
on the banks of the Stour. They made me a painter (& I am gratefull) – that is I had often thought of pictures of them before I had ever touched a pencil …’
But skies were also an old interest. The apprentice at his father’s windmill on Bergholt Heath had learned to study the sky for portents of the changeable East Anglian weather – for calm, for gales, for reliable grain-grinding breezes. Years before he had read Leonardo’s Trattura, in which painters are advised to get inspiration from shapes seen on damp walls, in the embers of fires and in cloud patterns.3 Like many, he felt simple gratitude for sky, for clouds, for sunlight shining on and through them. Now on the relative heights of Hampstead he had open air and became a regular sky-watcher again: in 1821 and 1822 he painted nearly one hundred sky studies. He often took note of the exact time he made such sketches, involving an hour or so each, though the skies could change rapidly while he worked. The wind was ‘very brisk’ and the clouds ‘running very fast’, he recorded on one study, ‘very appropriate for the Coast at Osmington’. This was one of twenty Constable sky studies in oil that eventually came into Charles Leslie’s hands and which Leslie said were painted ‘on large sheets of thick paper, and all dated, with the time of day, the direction of the wind, and other memoranda on their backs’.4 Occasionally a thin strip showing land or tops of trees at the bottom of the sketch anchored the clouds and sky. Rarely a few birds wheeled. Most often the scudding, drifting or towering clouds and gaps of sky were the sole subject – and one could read (between the lines as it were) the weather of the moment – rain showers, impending thunder, clearing skies, the sun coming out. It was a completely different routine from that involved in assembling the parts of an exhibition six-footer – parts which were static, formed already in his memory or imagination. Here he was dealing with impressions – moving elements, parts of the air – while the wind stirred the grass around him and smoothed or dishevelled the sky above.
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