And the contented householder congratulated Maria and himself on their domestic achievement before describing further antics of the cats, and an errand he had run on behalf of the AGBI to take £4 to an artist’s widow. He was still looking after ‘old Fontaine’ from time to time and sending on to him donations from other people ‘so that he is almost out of the difficulties, having paid all his rent, and got many things out of pawn’. When the Constables’ milkman lost one of his cows, Constable lent him £10, to be repaid when he could afford it.
His own financial condition wasn’t prosperous but (he told Fisher in September) wasn’t worse than usual. It was the year of a London banking crisis. Confidence had collapsed after a surge of reckless promotion of new companies, including one which was going to drain the Red Sea and find treasure left by the Old Testament Jews when fleeing Egypt.7 Given the shaky times, ‘not worse than usual’ wasn’t bad. Abram – though suffering losses of his own – was sending him £400 from the family business, and Constable meant to invest half of this in government funds in Maria’s name. Back at his easel in Charlotte Street he felt that ‘after 20 years hard uphill work’ he had at last ‘got the publick into my hands – and want not a patron’. Sir George Beaumont called in mid-September to look at his new paintings and tried to put the clock back; Constable told Maria that Sir George still wanted him ‘to imitate pictures’. But Constable had commissions enough, including one to alter his small version of Salisbury Cathedral for the late Bishop’s daughter Mrs Elizabeth Mirehouse, a painting of Hampstead Heath for a Mr Ripley and a version of The Lock for James Carpenter. He needed Johnny Dunthorne on hand to help for several months. Johnny came willingly and this time was boarded out with a local handyman called Ambrose, originally from Suffolk; Constable apparently wanted to spare the shy country boy the dangers of proximity to his maid Elizabeth. Johnny was invaluable, cleaning pictures, running messages, putting portfolios in order and working on a model boat for Charley. While Constable painted one copy of Mr Morrison’s Lock, Johnny was at his side painting another copy. Johnny also helped with the outline of Waterloo Bridge, which was underway again, on and off, later in the year and which Constable hoped to have ready for the next show at Somerset House. Stothard, unlike Sir George a critic Constable listened to, came to see it and suggested an alteration of some sort that Constable called ‘very capital’.
By the end of 1825 the commissioned works in progress amounted to £400 and Constable told Fisher ‘four months will do them – God will help those who help themselves’. Self-help was again necessary because his French connections had gone awry. In mid-November Arrowsmith had turned up in Charlotte Street to find out about several pictures he had ordered from Constable; he had a friend in tow, an ‘amateur’. Both artist and dealer were on edge. Arrowsmith was having money problems. Constable had just heard from Tinney that he would not lend Stratford Mill for an exhibition in Edinburgh and this irked the painter. Now, Arrowsmith wanted quick delivery of the paintings he had commissioned. His friend, the dreaded amateur, stood by witnessing the scene, along with Johnny Dunthorne and his father who was in town visiting his son. According to Constable, in a letter to Fisher, the French dealer was ‘so excessively impertinent and used such language as never was used to me at my easil before’. Constable flew off the handle, startling Arrowsmith. The Frenchman backed down and apologised. Constable said he couldn’t accept an apology. Arrowsmith departed with his friend, telling Johnny Dunthorne that he would gladly have given a hundred pounds to have avoided this scene.
Constable then wrote to Arrowsmith formally withdrawing from their arrangements and sent a draft of £40 for the amount he owed the dealer. Arrowsmith replied acknowledging that he alone was the sufferer. Constable said he would forget the affair; he left it to Arrowsmith to order or not order any more pictures. However, Arrowsmith was on the slide – bankruptcy was in the offing – and there would be no more orders. Charles Schroth also went under in mid-1826, forced to unload paintings at knock-down prices. Fisher thought Constable had let his impetuousness and paranoia get the better of him. He wrote: ‘We are all given to torment ourselves with imaginary evils – but no man had ever this disease in such alarming paroxysms as yourself. You imagine difficulties where none exist, displeasure where none is felt, contempt where none is shown and neglect where none is meant.’ Fisher could see that Constable might have some cause in the Arrowsmith dispute, but ‘poor Tinney’ was merely trying to achieve the return of something that he had paid for. He ‘had rather see his picture on his own walls than hear of it in Edinburgh … He says you are a devilish odd fellow. For you get your bread by painting. – He orders two pictures[,] leaves the subjects to yourself; offers ready money & you declare off for no intelligible reason.’
Constable replied that Fisher’s letter had done him good, but he was evidently still sure of his own case:
It is easy for a bye stander like you to watch one struggling in the water and then say your difficulties are only imaginary. I have a great part to perform & you a much greater, but with only this difference. You are removed from the ills of life – you are almost placed beyond circumstances. My master the publick is hard, cruel, & unrelenting, making no allowance for a backsliding … Your own profession closes in and protects you, mine rejoices in the opportunity of ridding itself of a member who is sure to be in somebodys way or other.
I have related no imaginary ills to you – to one so deeply involved in active life as I am they are realities … I live by shadows, to me shadows are realities … I am so engaged that Johny [sic] and I cant give up. I am in for a winters campaign.
Constable said that Johnny ‘doated’ on him. The young man was ‘calm – gentle – clever – & industrious, full of prudence – & free from vice. He is greived at his master having so much of the devil about him.’ Constable was, however, cheered by a visit from the actor Jack Bannister, who wanted to commission a Constable landscape. Encountering the artist at his door as he let out two chimney sweeps, Bannister – never lost for a wisecrack – exclaimed, ‘What – brother brush!’8
He was off to Brighton over the Christmas season to be with Maria and the children. On New Year’s Day he walked down to the beach and sat painting an oil sketch of the Channel, noting on the back of the picture: ‘From 12 till 2 p.m. Fresh breeze from S.S.W.’ He also painted Perne’s Mill, at Gillingham, Dorset, which a local woman had been requesting since the summer of 1824. While he was at his easel Maria read aloud from Nicolas Poussin’s letters, recently redis-covered and published in Paris. Maria was amused to find that painters then and now had much in common: ‘The letters are apologies to friends for not doing their pictures sooner – anxieties of all kinds, insults – from ignorance.’
It was very cold when he got back to London on 12 January. The Thames was frozen over; his pictures, returned from Lille, were stuck on a ship moored in the river. His sister Mary sent some fowls from Flatford and Constable told Maria he would send them on to her in Brighton – they would keep in this weather. Another gold medal had been awarded to him in Lille and the painter of The White Horse was lauded in the prefect’s discourse. Constable tried to make things right with Fisher, the absentee owner, by telling him, ‘All things considered, the gold medal should be yours.’ Fisher was probably more pleased to hear that his picture was in perfect shape, ‘without a speck of injury’. But then Constable, unlike some of his famous contemporaries, was technically an extremely sound painter whose works stood up to time.9 (Dunthorne Senior’s early practice with him must have helped.) Although he had told Fisher six weeks before that Waterloo Bridge would be ‘done for the next exhibition’, and shortly thereafter this said it was sticking to him ‘like a blister’ and disturbing his sleep, he had to drop the painting from his campaign. He needed to get on with pictures that might produce more immediate profit.
Sir Thomas Lawrence, the President of the Academy, came in January to look at his works and, standing before the Waterloo Bridge, pleased C
onstable by saying he had never admired his pictures so much. This compliment evaporated quickly; when the Academy elections took place on 10 February, Constable again got very few votes. A consolation was that his younger friend Charles Leslie took one of the two seats for painters and became a full Academician. But Constable was used to disappointment in regard to Somerset House, and as always ploughed on. Once more he heeded his own atavistic affections, and Farington’s ideas of how he should find popularity, with a large upright of his old local scenery. Waterloo Bridge was put aside (he claimed he did this partly because of ‘the ruined state of my finances’). At the beginning of March his Brighton friend Henry Phillips, the botanist, provided some natural history for the new picture: ‘I think it is July in your green lane. At this season all the tall grasses are in flower, bogrush, bullrush, teasel. The white bindweed now hangs in flowers over the branches of the hedge; the wild carrot and hemlock flower in banks of hedges, cow parsley, water plantain, &c.; … bramble is now in flower, poppy, mallow, thistle, hop, &c..’ What was to be The Cornfield slowly came into existence, absorbing him completely. He told Fisher on 8 April, ‘I could think of and speak to no one. I was like a friend of mine in the battle of Waterloo – he said he dared not turn his head to the right or left – but always kept it straight forward – thinking of himself alone.’ The painting was roughly the size of The Lock, though ‘a subject of a very different nature – inland – cornfields – a close lane, kind of thing – but it is not neglected in any part. The trees are more than usually studied and the extremities well defined – as well as their species – they are shaken by a pleasant and healthfull breeze.’ And he quoted, more or less, from Thomson’s The Seasons: ‘while now a fresher gale, sweeping with shadowy gust the feilds of corn &c., &c.’10
The lane was Fen Lane. He had walked or run down it as a boy – the quickest way from East Bergholt to the river. He had sketches for it at hand, and pictures of it in his head. Whether he himself had ever lain prone on the dry summer ground and drunk from the cool spring, who knows? The boy doing so in the painting, while his dog paused, was perhaps a sentimental touch but he couldn’t resist it; for a while he called the picture ‘The Drinking Boy’.11 The boy has taken off his hat to drink. He has a blue kerchief tied around his neck and wears a red waistcoat. He looks like a slightly younger version of the youth on The Leaping Horse. When he sent the painting to Somerset House it was entitled, in his usual way, Landscape and became Landscape: Noon for the British Institution (but people took to calling it The Cornfield, and that it became after 1838). Constable confessed to Fisher his hopes of selling it: ‘It has certainly got a little more eye-salve than I usually condescend to give to them.’ (His son Charles Golding Constable later remarked that the little church in the distance never existed and was put there by ‘painter’s license’.)12 Constable worked at the Academy on at least one of the varnishing days. The sculptor Chantrey was as always prowling around and, noticing the dark shadows under the tails of the sheep, said in his usual jokey way, ‘Why Constable, all your sheep have got the rot – give me the palette – I must cure them.’ Chantrey’s efforts made matters worse; he threw the palette rag at Constable and departed.13 Constable himself remained in a good humour; he thought the exhibition that year was ‘delightful’. He told Fisher, ‘Turner never gave me so much pleasure – and so much pain – before.’ Turner was showing four works, including the impressive Forum Romanum painted for Sir John Soane. His pain-provoking problem, according to the critics, was too much yellow. About this Constable noted generously, ‘But every man who distinguishes himself in a great way, is on a precipice.’
The Cornfield was admired. Although it didn’t find a purchaser then and there, it opened the gate through which a great number of people were to pass into Constable’s country. The Times liked his Gillingham Mill as well, but thought The Cornfield ‘singularly beautiful, and not inferior to some of Hobbema’s most admired works’. Robert Hunt in The Examiner said, ‘Mr Constable is not so potent a genius [as Turner]; but in the rural walk in which he has moved, he is one of the most natural Painters of his time … He has been faithful to his first love, Nature, from the commencement of his career. He is a chaste Painter, and goes hand in hand with her alone …’ In 1850 Thackeray talked of The Cornfield as a piece which seemed to be ‘under the influence of a late shower; the shrubs, trees and distance are saturated with it … One cannot but admire the manner in which the specific character of every object is made out: the undulations of the ripe corn, the chequered light on the road; the freshness of the banks, the trees and their leafage, the brilliant clouds artfully contrasted against the trees, and here and there broken by azure.’14 As noted, corn was the term at the time for any cereal crop, but this looks like wheat, a thick golden carpet on the slope of the field, framed by trees and hedges and the river meadow beyond. The open gate reveals the lush crop growing nearly to the height of the gateposts.
The radiant field was a symbol of peace and fertility, an image of what fed people. But it was also a painting of money in the bank. Since Charles II’s reign, for well over a century, the import of corn had been restricted, with bounties to encourage exports, and this had made for good times for farmers, landowners and grain dealers such as Abram. The long war with France caused further restrictions. The price of wheat rose 300 per cent in twenty years, and the poor, who depended largely on bread, suffered greatly. When peace came in 1815 corn prices began to fall, so more laws were introduced to keep out imports, prop up prices and restore the incomes of the ‘landed interest’. This happened despite the complaints of consumers, particularly poor country folk, and the vehement opposition of townspeople, high and low.15
Constable was in East Bergholt unexpectedly in April. His sister Mary had written to say that Abram was very ill – would he come down? Mr Travis had called and found the patient in a profuse perspiration and eating nothing, though with a clear mind. Abram’s staff had rallied round and Mary added the news which had much cheered Abram: ‘Flour rose 5d. per sack to day which he likes to hear rather than the reverse.’ In the village Constable spent three days with his brother and sister at Flatford Mill, and this gave him time to walk the river banks and along Fen Lane. On his return to town he wrote to Fisher that he had lately been in Suffolk and ‘had some delightfull walks in the same fields’. Abram seemed better when Constable left East Bergholt, but he then had a week’s relapse with chills and fever. Later, in the autumn, he wrote to thank John for having cheered him up in his illness: ‘for sure I am you must have anxiety & care enough of your own, but your own vigour of intellect & energy of body has hitherto, aided by the Divine blessing, carried you through.’ Hitherto, and for a while yet.
13. Life Slips (1826–28)
ON 11 JUNE 1826 John Constable turned fifty. If he had drawn up a balance sheet of his life to that date, he might have considered such ‘same fields’ paintings as The Leaping Horse and The Cornfield – and the deep commitment to landscape they represented – as making up for a great deal of disappointment. He was still not a full member of the Academy, though his five children, brought forth by Maria at a cost yet to be fully measured, continued to prove a splendid compensation for the slings and arrows of the art world. In mid-May, while Maria (pregnant again) was in Putney with Minna, staying with her sister Louisa, he wrote his wife a journal-like letter in which the other young Constables figured often along with other news – of Dr Gooch’s poor health, a supper dance at the Chalons, and Charley’s toothache, ‘which hurts his nights’. On 24 May Mrs Roberts was still asleep when Constable wrote: ‘Got up quite early to write to you before 8 – Saw the children at 7 – Emily’s eyes were open & she was smiling – Isabel sitting up in her crib & saying, come here papa – & Charley was kneeling up in his bed which was full of things – cheifly boats …’ A week earlier Constable’s temper had been tested when one of the boys put a broom handle through a painting, but he was rarely cross with his children.1
Although h
e intended them all to stay in Charlotte Street during the summer, saving money by not paying ‘for the privilege of sleeping in a hen-coop for the sake of country air’, Maria’s health made him change his mind. Brighton was again considered – Maria’s father, now seventy-four, was convalescing there after an attack of apoplexy – but Constable decided to try Hampstead once more. He found a small house on Downshire Hill, half of a double house known as Langham Place, and ‘an easy walk from Charlotte Street’.2 He told Fisher about this and chided him for not keeping in touch: ‘You once said “life is short,” let us make the most of friendship while we can.’ Constable also wanted to know what Fisher thought of an invitation he had received from Henry Phillips to contribute a paper on art to a literary journal Phillips was starting. Fisher was busy with ecclesiastical duties which he compared with Constable’s exertions leading up to the annual RA exhibition, and he was anxious about the ‘disturbance in the currency’ that was rattling the country. But he replied at the end of September:
I am doubtful about your Brighton Gazette. You are in possession of some very valuable and original matter on the subject of painting … I should be very sad to see this seed sown on an unvisited field … Throw your thoughts together, as they arise in a book (that they be not lost); when I come to see you, we will look them over, put them into shape, and do something with them … Set about it immediately. Life slips. It will perhaps bring your children in £100 in a day of short commons, if it does nothing else. Besides, I have been all along desirous of writing your life & rise in the art.
Constable went on painting through the late stages of Maria’s next pregnancy, though a trip to Brighton had to be made to pick up young John from school. From there Constable wrote as if with hope to Maria in Hampstead, ‘This is certainly a wonderfull place for setting people up – making the well, better – & the ill, well, so so … Old Neptune gets all the Ladies with child – for we can hardly lay it to the men which we see pulled & led about the beach here.’ Maria presumably charged her husband rather than the sea god with her own condition and seems to have been fatalistic about it. Perhaps both she and her husband felt that the life-urge redressed the doom impending; they needed to create new life where for her it was beginning to slip away. But at his easel Constable could more or less shut out the world and its anxieties, particularly Maria’s sickness, whooping cough among the children, and his declining father-in-law continuing to complain about being hard up and having made many bad loans. (‘It is his fate to be devoured by strangers’, Constable told Fisher on 9 September.) The brush in his hand, the palette and canvas before him, created their own concerns, their need for solutions in terms of colour and form and light, brush stroke by brush stroke. In front of the easel he was in a bubble which lasted happily or unhappily as long as his concentration and physical energy. Painting was always hard physical work; he ended the day with weak arms and dirty fingers.
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