Perhaps being run-down was a factor in an episode in March, when Constable’s propensity to repeat gossip got him into trouble with William Collins and John Linnell. A complicated story, it involved a long-haired drawing master from Southampton called Read, an acquaintance of Linnell’s, whom Constable had met at John Fisher’s. Read, with painting ambitions, brought some studies to Hampstead to show Constable and apparently claimed to have been badly treated by Linnell, who was like Read a Baptist. Constable – no admirer of Dissenters – retailed this to colleagues at Somerset House and Linnell, who was standing for Associate membership, attributed to Constable his failure to be elected (an overestimate of Constable’s influence). With Collins on Linnell’s side, it was like a duel, though Constable seemed to realise he was in the wrong. He backed down, agreeing to put in writing his belief that Read’s assertions were false. A comic moment in the drama occurred when Read had a large number of his paintings delivered to Charlotte Street, hoping for Constable’s help in getting them exhibited. They were stacked up outside the door of number 35 and a crowd gathered to look at them, saying – Constable claimed – they made quite a show and were better than Constable’s.6
Despite these distractions, Constable buckled down to work on a big canvas, this time upright and slightly less than five feet tall, showing a barge in Flatford Lock with the lock-keeper opening the shutter of the gates to release water and lower the craft. He worked as well on Dr Fisher’s Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s Grounds. This, together with A Study of Trees and A Cottage, were his entries for the Academy exhibition; A Barge passing a Lock wasn’t ready, and he thought he suffered from it. But the Cathedral, though smaller, made its effect. The cathedral looked like scrimshaw, carved from whalebone or ivory, framed by trees and with two figures on the path in the left foreground – the Bishop pointing out the spire to his wife, somewhat like donors in a medieval religious picture. ‘I have not flinched at the work, of the windows, buttresses, &c.,’ Constable wrote to John Fisher on 9 May. A number of white cumulus clouds were intruded on by one dark cloud, which bothered the Bishop; another version of the picture was made for the Bishop’s daughter Elizabeth on her marriage later that year, with the clouds more diffused and with more of what Archdeacon Fisher spelled out as necessary sunshine. (Someone of the Bishop’s persuasion was Henry Fuseli, the RA Professor of Painting, who liked Constable’s landscapes but said that the painter made him call for his greatcoat and umbrella.) Another sunny-but-serene, white-clouds-only version of the cathedral was done by 1826 to replace the one the Bishop had commissioned but didn’t like. Constable preferred to make a new one rather than alter the first. In any event the critics generally admired the exhibited Cathedral and its one dark cloud. The Literary Gazette’s writer thought it ‘striking’ though he also found it ‘mannered’ – this was a word which would dog Constable from now on. The Morning Chronicle would have liked less attention to detail in the architecture; apparently a little flinching might have been in order. Callcott told Constable he thought his fellow artist had managed the painting well, but Constable returned this compliment with his verdict to Fisher that the picture Callcott had on show was poor. However, Constable said that Turner’s picture, The Bay of Baiae, seemed ‘painted with saffron and indigo’. Turner, he thought, was ‘stark mad – with ability’.7
Constable’s health seems to have improved by this time; his pictures for the annual show were off his back and in late April he had managed a quick trip to Bergholt. Spring feelings warmed his 9 May letter to Fisher. He had much work to do, and finances to repair. ‘However though I am here in the midst of the world I am out of it – and am happy – and endeavour to keep myself unspoiled. I have a kingdom of my own both fertile & populous – my landscape and my children … Let me hear from you – soon.’8
That summer the Constables’ out-of-town house in Hampstead was Stamford Lodge in Stamford Place. There and in Charlotte Street Constable got a great deal of work done, including two portraits for the Countess of Dysart. In July he spent several days with an amateur painter who was a great fan both of his and of Turner’s. The Reverend Thomas Judkin was pastor of the Somers Town Episcopal chapel and exhibited from time to time at the Royal Academy. Constable told Fisher in July 1823 after his stay in Southgate with Judkin: ‘He is a sensible man … but he will paint.’ And was he sensible? Maria early on had Judkin sized up as a time-waster, who kept dropping by Charlotte Street to chat about Art; he and the occasional poet Peter Coxe were numbered by her among Constable’s ‘loungers’.
Constable also had a ‘great row’ about this time with Turner and Collins, apparently about Academy matters; something of a civil war was going on at Somerset House, with Turner ‘watchful and savage’. Turner had helped put landscape painting in the front rank of art, and Constable should have been grateful to him; but he lacked Turner’s bumptious self-confidence and his pride made him prickly and resentful. Collins, whose works often featured ‘happy urchins and pious labourers’, showed him a recent painting which Constable disliked; it was ‘insipid … and far too pretty to be natural’.
Fisher still wanted to buy The Hay Wain but still couldn’t afford it. He hoped to get Constable to Salisbury but thought his friend was probably too tied ‘to your family, your portraits, and the necessity of carrying your dish between fame and famine’. But Constable found time to buy for eight guineas a painting of fruit Fisher had wanted – and was rewarded with instant repayment and a perceptive compliment: ‘Where real business is to be done you are the most energetic and punctual of men: in smaller matters, such as putting on your breeches, you are apt to lose time in deciding which leg shall go in first.’ And Constable then got organised to visit Fisher. He left his family well and arrived in Salisbury at 6 p.m. on 19 August, in time for dinner with his ‘best friend in the world’. There was immediately pressure for him to stay on in Salisbury. Fisher’s uncle, the Bishop, wanted to discuss the wedding-picture copy of the Cathedral, and the ‘kind & friendly’ Tinney wanted two upright landscapes at fifty guineas each. After making another quick sketch of the cathedral, however, Constable went on with Fisher to Gillingham where the archdeacon’s family were in residence and where the company of Constable offered social support. Constable found Gillingham ‘a melancholy place’, its people poor and dirty. Fisher felt on his own there, seen by the locals as one of the tithe collectors who made life onerous, ordained to steal milk and butter from their mouths – although they welcomed Fisher’s medical expertise for their wounds and illnesses. The fact that he was a part-time incumbent probably didn’t help. Constable liked riding around with Fisher and listening to him talk about a special sermon he was working on, apparently for the cathedral, and he liked being at home with Mary Fisher and the Fisher children. He described them all in a letter to Maria, knowing she would be interested in comparing them with their own: Osmond stammered, Emma was bashful, William known as Belim was Constable’s favourite, and Frank with delicate silk-like hair reminded him of Charley.
One jaunt Constable took with Fisher was to Fonthill, the folly-mansion the eccentric writer and traveller William Beckford had built, and which had recently been sold to a gunpowder manufacturer. From the top of Fonthill tower Constable saw the spire of Salisbury Cathedral fifteen miles away; it ‘darted up into the sky like a needle’. The house was amazing, Constable told Maria. ‘Imagine … any beautifull Gothick building magnificently fitted up with crimson & gold, antient pictures, in almost every nitch statues, large massive gold boxes for relicks … beautiful & rich carpets, curtains & glasses – some of which spoiled the effect – but … on the whole, a strange, ideal, romantic place – quite fairy land.’ An immense sale of objects and paintings was going on that Constable called something of an ‘auctioneer’s job’. Harry Phillips, the auctioneer, had apparently added many items to Beckford’s collection, knowing the Beckford name would help shift them. The sale went on for thirty-nine days. The Fishers turned up on one occasion to buy three lo
ts of old china. Fisher teased Constable: ‘One of them I bought on the speculation of swapping it with you for one of your little sea peices.’
At first the weather while Constable was in Gillingham made painting difficult. He wrote to Maria every four or five days, asking what was happening at home and telling her that from the Fishers’ garden he could hear the Gillingham watermill, which rattled away as its machinery turned out cotton, the sounds making him think of Flatford. He had been too long away from her: ‘I miss you at night and once I thought I had you in my arms, how provoking.’ But despite several pledges to return, Constable as always found it hard to shake himself loose. Fisher’s friendship was ‘at once the pride – the honour – and grand stimulus of my life’. Perhaps thinking a news-filled letter would compensate for his absence, he told Maria about the perquisites the Fishers gave their servants: ‘Mrs F. says 2 guineas is the usual allowance for [tea] & sugar.’ He was at least two weeks overdue when he got back to Hampstead in mid-September and found his family ‘better than I have ever had them’.
Back in Hampstead and Charlotte Street, he spent a bit more than a month working on Tinney’s pictures and hanging his ‘bridal picture’ of Salisbury Cathedral in Seymour Street ready for the arrival of Elizabeth Fisher and her husband. He also did another favour for John Fisher, for a few days looking after a poodle the archdeacon had bought in town. But what are best friends for? Constable said his cook and the two cats would be able to amuse Fisher’s dog. And then he once again left London. Maria had Mrs Roberts and other servants at Stamford Lodge to help with the children, so maybe she didn’t mind too much, at first, when Constable went to stay with Sir George and Lady Beaumont in Leicestershire. He suggested he was going to Coleorton Hall for roughly a week. He wrote to Maria on getting there, excited by the loveliness of the place: ‘Such grounds – such trees – such distances …’
On the way he had stopped in Leicester to call on his niece Alicia, Martha Whalley’s daughter, who was at school there. Family connections mattered to him. He reported to Maria that Alicia looked ‘delightfully’, her cheeks rosy from being surprised and kissed by a gentleman – her uncle John. But what he found at Coleorton was what really mattered: ‘Only think that I am now writing in a room full of Claudes (not Glovers) [the RA painter of decorative landscapes] – real Claudes, and Wilsons & Poussins &c. – almost at the summit of my earthly ambitions. I cannot help asking myself how I came here.’ On the one hand, he felt sad, thinking with tears in his eyes of his ‘ducks’ and her, ‘my poor Fish’. On the other hand, the Beaumonts were so kind he gradually felt quite at home.
Or so he said. The relationship between Sir George and Constable was never simple. Beaumont was a great ‘patron’ even if he never bought anything from Constable; he was influential in the London art world and a collector of genius (his pictures were to help found the new National Gallery). He wanted to improve Constable’s taste, and may always have felt slightly miffed that Constable wasn’t open to that sort of improvement. The Beaumonts were among the grandest people Constable had close contact with, and he arrived in their house shouldering his background as the art-loving Suffolk boy whose family was in trade and whose mother had been acquainted with Sir George’s mother in Dedham. Sir George’s fortune was underpinned by Leicestershire coal mines.9 However, as a ‘leader of Taste’, which Charles Leslie called him, he had weaknesses, the first being that the taste he preferred was gone by, and he bought neither of the most talented artists of his time. Beaumont actively disliked Turner’s paintings and Constable was perhaps too close to him to be seen for the original he was. Turner looked on Sir George with an equally cold eye; his pictures were ‘made-up’, he thought. Constable didn’t detect any threat to himself in Beaumont’s derivative art and remained generous. ‘I feel that I am indebted to him for what I am as an artist,’ he wrote later to William Wordsworth – who also had cause to be thankful for Sir George’s patronage.10
At Coleorton Constable looked at some sky studies by Alexander Cozens. He copied a small Claude, probably Landscape with Goatherd and Goats, ‘a grove scene of great beauty … It contains almost all that I wish to do in landscape.’ At night, after hearing Sir George reading Shakespeare aloud, say Jaques’s speech from As You Like It about the seven ages of man, he slept with another Claude in his bedroom. He expected Maria to be jealous – she had counted on him being home by now. That she was fed up shone through a letter in which she wrote, seemingly compliant, ‘As it is for your advantage I must put myself out of the question and submit without murmuring to my fate.’ Her fate was unwittingly touched on a few lines later, when she said she had successfully cured Charley of an illness ‘without Mr Drew’, the apothecary, and added, ‘I wish I could cure myself but everyone says how thin I am grown.’ A week later, in mid-November, she wrote that his friends were beginning to wonder what had become of him. Constable, thick-skinned in these matters, replied next day mentioning other little jobs Sir George had for him, and adding that the Beaumonts wanted him to spend Christmas with them. This provoked Maria to write on 21 November that she would expect him ‘the end of next week certainly, it was complimentary in Sir George to ask you to remain the Xmas, but he forgot at the time that you had a wife’.
A polite if obsessional host, indeed; but the question recurs: Why did Sir George never buy a Constable painting? Although they generally seemed to agree about the old masters, their tastes actually differed, so Leslie thought.11 Sir George constantly communed with pictures whose tints were ‘subdued by time’, such as those by Gaspar Poussin, and this unsuited his eye ‘for the enjoyment of freshness’. And Constable was ‘too daring in the modes he adopted to obtain this quality’. When Sir George ‘recommended the colour of an old Cremona fiddle for the prevailing tone of everything … Constable answered by laying an old fiddle on the green lawn before the house’, to show Sir George that brown didn’t work for trees and grass. Constable admired Beaumont’s hard-working attitude in painting, even as an amateur. He wrote a touch optimistically to Fisher, ‘Painting like religion knows no difference of rank.’ He and Sir George became sincere friends but the social differences were buried rather than removed. It took him more than a week in the Beaumonts’ company to lose ‘all uncomfortable reserve and restraint’, and he ended his six-week stay at Coleorton feeling greater self-esteem – but suffering nervous exhaustion.12
When Constable finally got back to town, to Maria and his ‘ducks’, all his pent-up anxiety exploded. His happiness at being with his family went up, as in a chimney fire. It was his old complaint, neuralgia, with severe pains in the teeth, face and head. His teeth and jaw problems apparently started in 1798 at the time of Mr Travis’s dental operation, and often seemed to strike him just when he was getting down to work on his pictures for Somerset House. In later years he sympathised with Leslie about toothache because he knew what it was like: ‘it is an entire illness with me at all times when I am so visited’. Beaumont wrote early in 1824, hearing the artist had been unwell, admonishing him to get ‘air and exercise’, otherwise he would never reach Sir George’s age. For one who had been a very active child and youth, and despite his skying excursions on the Heath, Constable wasn’t a great one for regular exercise. Leslie said, ‘He loitered rather than walked, and his pace could scarcely be quickened into exercise, unless he was late for some appointment.’13
He must also have been very worried about Maria. When Fisher came to town in February he found her poorly. Perhaps she was suffering from let-down at the reunion with her fatigued husband after his absence at the Beaumonts. But there was more to Maria’s illness than that. It is unclear whether Constable had a full idea what was wrong; if so he probably didn’t want to believe it. He never used in his letters the word ‘consumption’ (or ‘phthisis’ as it was then generally called). However, Charles Leslie and Henry Syer Trimmer later did,14 and Constable knew that there had to be something wrong with the Bicknells: her brother Durand, dead in 1811 aged nineteen; her
mother, long an invalid, dead in 1815; and her brother Sam, who he had told Farington was suffering from consumption, dead in 1821, aged twenty-four. There were worries on the same score about her sister Catherine now. Consumption was known to run in families (as with the Brontës), though no one recognised until 1882 that it was an infectious disease caused by the tubercle bacillus, a microbe or bacterium. Cow’s milk could carry and spread the bacterium and so could coughing, sneezing and spitting. Night-sweats, weight loss, tiredness and coughing up blood were all symptoms. It came on gradually, solemnly, and seemed, as Dickens noted, to prepare its victims for death ‘grain by grain’. It was a disease, he thought, that ‘medicine never cured, wealth never warded off’. Anaemia was an invariable feature of it. ‘Youth grows pale, and spectre thin, and dies,’ wrote Keats in 1819. Despite this the doctors of the age recommended bleeding and near-starvation as treatment. Arsenic, quinine, ergot and coal gas were among the remedies in vogue, while digitalis, tartar-emetic and laudanum were much prescribed.15
Bleeding in fact gave brief respite from the breathlessness that affected victims as their lungs were destroyed, but that was all. Many purported remedies were toxic. Patients were often kept in hermetically sealed rooms. Some ‘cures’ such as horse-riding were now and then in vogue, while Lady Denham in Jane Austen’s Sanditon was sensibly prepared to supply asses’ milk to consumptives sojourning at that embryonic coastal resort. Fresh air and sea air were sometimes proposed for sufferers, as were balloon-ascents. Constable’s interest in clouds and the skies may have been increased by Maria’s need for breathable air. One impressive aspect of the disease was that it seemed to affect more young women than men. There were consequently many nineteenth-century stage heroines speaking or singing their last as art copied life. One popular early photographic print was Henry Peach Robinson’s Fading Away of 1858, which showed a young woman dying of consumption. Another feature of the disease was that it seemed to produce a surfeit of sexual energy; it was, according to one authority, ‘the most lecherous of all illnesses’. Many of the female victims became pregnant; this seemed to bring in its train sudden remissions or more drastic, rapid deterioration. One other constant factor was the irrational optimism that seized consumptives. ‘The hope of the tuberculous’ was well known, part of their heightened awareness, and part of their tragedy. ‘My poor Fish,’ Constable had written to Maria from Coleorton, happy with the Claudes and Poussins, missing her with tears in his eyes. More than he yet knew, she was Poor Fish.16
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