Letters between painter and engraver tracked the uneven progress of the work. On 26 February 1830, for example, Constable chivvied Lucas – often in homely figures of speech – about the plates he was working on. ‘I want to know how forward the “Evening” is and the retouched “Stoke”,’ he wrote. And: ‘I have taken much pains with the last proof of the “Summerland”, but I fear I shall be obliged to reject it. It has never recovered from its first trip up, and the sky with the new ground is and ever will be as rotten as cow dung.’ And: ‘I like your first plates, for they are by far (very far) the best, but I allow much for your distractions since, with these devils the printers – and your finances, and other matters, not in unison with that patient toil, which ought always to govern the habits of us both – but more perhaps yours …’ And: ‘Bring me another “Castle” or two or three, for it is mighty fine – though it looks as if all the chimney sweepers in Christendom had been at work on it, & thrown their soot bags up in the air. Yet everybody likes it – but I should recollect that no one but the elect see my things – I have no doubt the world despises them … Come early tomorrow evening, and bring what you can – & an account of the state of the next – I am nervous, & anxious about them …’
Sometimes Lucas got it wrong and aroused the painter’s anger. After Lucas altered a ‘Glebe Farm’ plate without being asked to, and sent Constable a proof, Constable wrote in anguish to him, ‘I frankly tell you I could burst into tears – never was there such a wreck. Do not touch the plate again on any account … I could cry for my poor wretched wreck of the Glebe Farm.’ In one undated blast, at what was clearly a nervous moment (probably in 1833), Constable complained to Lucas, ‘This dreadfull book must be my ruin … You do nothing right – not one thing that you say you will … It was the devil himself who first led me step by step to do it – thus to waste the sacred property of my children’ – in other words Mr Bicknell’s legacy. An apology to Lucas soon followed.8
Constable at first intended English Landscape to be eight plates in two parts each of four. Lucas was paid £15 and later £17 per plate. But Constable kept changing his mind about the subjects to be engraved and which plate should be in what part. Lucas was kept to the mark with admonitions about, say, the windmills. Constable was keen not to be added to the roster of ‘uninformed artists’ who created sails ‘that no amount of wind would be able to turn round’. Constable went to visit Lucas now and then, tried out his printing press, and made drawings to show him how a windmill functioned.9 However, the project went on growing like Topsy. In the initial series of 1830 to 1832 five parts or ‘numbers’ were printed, four of which had four prints and one six prints (several hundred impressions were apparently taken from each plate). A sixth part was contemplated but instead of this a further, differently arranged set of parts replaced the first, with an expanded title, an introduction and notes. Despite Constable’s letter to Fisher of 24 May 1830 promising the first number the following week, publication was delayed until early July. Copies could be bought from 34 Charlotte Street and from the Colnaghis in Pall Mall East, though like Turner Constable resented the commissions taken by print dealers (the ‘sharks’, as he called them).10
A copy of the first number received a hospitable review from the Athenaeum. The subjects were more varied than expected from Mr Constable, ‘who appears to have fed his genius, like a tethered horse, within a small circle in the homestead’. The Spectator faulted the ‘extreme blackness and coarseness’ of the engravings, while admitting that they displayed great feeling. Constable also presented copies to Peter de Wint, the landscape painter, who was grateful; to John Britton, antiquarian and topographical draughtsman, who like The Spectator thought the prints too black; and to James and William Carpenter, the father-and-son booksellers in Bond Street. Constable generally dealt with the son, in the hope that he would promote the work through the shop, rather than the father, with whom he had had his problems – not uncommon with those who bought or thought they had bought one of Constable’s pictures and then found Constable hanging on to it, and allegedly improving it. James Carpenter went through this with A Boat Passing a Lock, exhibited at the Academy in 1829, and, not managing to acquire it, eventually agreed to accept a new Constable painting of the same size, for which he put up a deposit of one hundred guineas. Constable told Carpenter that Helmingham Dell – which he occasionally referred to as ‘A Wood’ – would be his but changed his mind just before he sent it to the Academy in 1830; he decided to keep it, forfeiting Carpenter’s friendship and having to pay back the hundred guineas. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t painted the same scene several times, with a rather rickety bridge spanning a stream running towards the viewer through a dark, tree-shaded declivity, though this time there were deer, a cow, and a few small human figures that increased the sense of melancholy. Constable had no other purchaser lined up; he simply wanted to keep the painting.11
The ‘Wood’ figured in mezzotint-form in English Landscape; it was a spot to which he had been attached, as were most of the subjects in his ‘book’. Others were East Bergholt common and its windmill for a plate named Spring; a view of West End Fields, Hampstead, entitled Noon; the shore at Brighton in surf and wind, A Sea Beach; and also Weymouth Bay, Hadleigh Castle, several Stour valley scenes and – a little more removed but meaningful to him – Old Sarum and the entrance to Yarmouth harbour. The frontispiece, which he and Lucas got around to in 1831 for the fifth part, showed the front of his parents’ house and its grounds, with a man sketching, his dog nearby. The Latin epigraph below the title of East Bergholt, Suffolk was that translated in 1820 by John Fisher and his brother-in-law Christopher Cookson:
Brighton: a sea beach
This spot saw the day spring of my life,
Hours of Joy, and years of Happiness.
This place first tinged my boyish fancy with a love of the art,
This place was the origin of my Fame.12
What some like The Spectator saw as Constable’s extreme blackness or his fondness for the soot bucket was explained in his introduction. It was intended. He was seeking chiaroscuro as a main effect, and mezzotint was the technique best suited for this. The Italian term was briefly alluded to in the first series; in the second, in 1833, it was heralded in the subtitle, where the work being offered was said to be ‘Principally Intended to Mark the Phenomena of the Chiar’Oscuro of Nature’. In a later lecture he defined chiaroscuro as ‘that power which creates space; we find it everywhere and at all times in nature; opposition, union, light, shade, reflection, and refraction, all contribute to it’.13 But it wasn’t just an artistic means of creating space and bringing a picture to life; it was a natural thing, the ‘medium by which the grand and varied aspects of landscape are displayed, both in the fields and on canvass’ [sic]. Light and shadow were what counted, and the way these elements were balanced in a painting was all-important. Constable wanted his prints to direct the viewer’s attention to this. Because mezzotint’s rich blackness mimicked his own dark clouds (and possibly expressed his own black depressions), it was a suitable medium for him, particularly in the hands of David Lucas. In many of the most successful plates, Lucas got across the effects of Constable’s broad and heavily paint-loaded brushwork. By vivid contrast and suggestive gradation, he caught Constable’s solemnity and melancholy and the moments of glorious illumination. The antithetical elements, the light and the dark, were brought home by Lucas to the man who painted the original pictures. In 1834 Constable told Lucas, after being moved by the prints Lucas had made of The Lock and The Cornfield, ‘Now … is every bit of sunshine clouded over in me. I can never now look at these two flattering testimonies of the result of my singularly marked life … without the most painful emotions.’14 Mezzotint was right for the way he felt post-Maria: black-and-white emotions; darkness visible.
The descriptions that Constable wrote for some of the plates attempted to convey important matters, but the effort sometimes came across as stilted rather than spontaneous.
For example, the plodding commentary for Stoke-by-Nayland: ‘The solemn stillness of Nature in a Summer’s Noon, when attended by thunder-clouds, is the sentiment attempted in this print; at the same time, an endeavour has been made to give an additional interest … by the introduction of the Rainbow.’ Nature exhibited ‘no feature more lovely nor any that awaken a more soothing reflection than the Rainbow’. He went on to analyse the phenomenon at length. He made a number of sketches and diagrams of rainbows; they seemed to be symbols of the hope he now sought. Other mementoes included a flight of rooks in a sunset at East Bergholt, the birds introduced possibly because he recalled an occasion at Osmington when a rook’s cawing accompanied a walk with Fisher – and the rooks gave Lucas trouble, looking as they did like blemishes on the plate. Constable’s printed prospectus for his book declared his desire ‘to increase the interest for, and promote the study of, the rural scenery of England, with all its endearing associations, and even in its most simple localities; England with her climate of more than vernal freshness …’15 And so on. He took an epigraph from Cicero: ‘how much painters see in shade and protrusions that we do not see’. And he went frequently to his favourite poets – Shakespeare, Milton, Thomson, Akenside and Wordsworth – for helpful associations.16
If some of the attached writing was inflated, the twenty-two mezzotint prints engraved by Lucas served Constable’s purpose. They showed rural England at its most winning time, a landscape shaped by use and craft, with hedges, copses, crops, locks, watermills and windmills, beach groins and harbour jetties, farmhouses and Norman churches. At one point he meant to dedicate English Landscape to John Fisher. Leslie later found in one of Constable’s sketchbooks a draft of such a dedication:
I know not if the landscapes I now offer to your notice will add to the esteem in which you have always been so kind as to hold me as a painter; I shall dedicate them to you, relying on that affection which you have invariably extended to me under every circumstance.
But, perhaps because Constable backed into the project in an irregular fashion, with the frontispiece appearing in 1831, a year after the first prints were made, and the letterpress commentaries two years after that, a dedication never appeared. Although Lucas produced more than four thousand prints, not many were sold. The Colnaghis got rid of a few and some individual buyers appeared, such as Lord Dover, who sent ten guineas for copies of the fifth number. Constable gave away a good many. At one point he added a ruin to the painting of the Glebe Farm he had sent to Lucas for transcription into mezzotint, saying ‘not to have a symbol in the book of myself, and of the “Work” which I have projected, would be missing the opportunity’. In 1832 numerous letters to Lucas from the painter expressed Constable’s sense of ruination over English Landscape. The printer they were using for the letterpress, W.J. Sparrow, had been causing trouble. Sparrow was in love, waxing poetic, and his marriage plans got in the way of the humdrum work of printing. In June 1832 he sent Constable a large slice of wedding cake when the artist was impatient for proofs.17 Gloom was piled on blackness heaped on gloom. Leslie put it well when he wrote that English Landscape ultimately proved to be, ‘as Coleridge said of a work of his own, “a secret confided to the public, and very faithfully kept” ’.18
17. Clouds Overhead (1831–32)
THROUGH MUCH OF the period in which English Landscape was being brought to birth, Constable wasn’t well; his ill health was both physical and mental. He wanted his book of prints to appear but the effort involved great depressions and weakened his resistance. He was fifty-four going on fifty-five in 1831, not an old man. Yet when Daniel Maclise, one of the Academy Life School students, sketched him at work that year as a Visitor at the Academy’s Life School, Constable had an undoubtedly ‘senior’ look, the crown of his head bald and long sideburns only in part compensating for it. Disappointment with the paltry sales of English Landscape was multiplied by sickness: what he thought was his not unusual long-lasting winter cold turned into something worse. On 2 February 1831 he sent Lucas a message: ‘I am so weak that I can hardly write.’ And on 12 March, also to Lucas: ‘I cough all night, which leaves me sadly weak all day.’1 Did he wonder if he had Maria’s disease? Dr Davis called, and Mr Drew the apothecary brought medicines and pills.
All this cut into his painting time, making for ‘sad work’ on a canvas for the RA exhibition; he was engaged on a new large Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows. One visitor, Sir William Beechey, called on 23 March and gave him good cheer and bad: ‘Why damn it Constable, what a damned fine picture you are making, but you look damned ill – and you have got a damned bad cold.’2 Leslie thought Constable’s ‘redoubled application’ on his exhibition pictures ‘fatigued his mind’, though the Salisbury Cathedral was only accompanied by a stop-gap Yarmouth Pier. He had apparently painted this some years before but hadn’t shown it at Somerset House; it would, as noted, figure as one of Lucas’s mezzotints for English Landscape in 1832. The sad work at the easel was enough, along with the easterly winds and irregular meals, to disorder his health. Although Constable generally liked his main meal at midday, the time varied if he was busy painting. Leslie found him in mid-session sustaining himself on an orange, and observed that Constable would finally ‘sit down to dinner ill with exhaustion, when it was too dark to paint’.3
Daniel Maclise’s drawing of Constable, c.1831
Constable also threw a lot into his Visitorship at the Life School. The job not only involved putting the model in a suitable pose but advising the students. Constable, like Turner, was an innovative teacher and a popular one. Both believed that models were better posed not in isolation but in a real context.4 Constable chose as the basis for his settings a scene from a celebrated old master or piece of classical art, such as a Last Judgement by Michelangelo, with two male figures, or a female nude as an Amazon. One of his first was based on a Raphael Eve and was appreciated by both the students and Academicians – particularly Etty, a persistent Life student and admirer of the unclothed female form. Constable told Leslie that he had set the girl in paradise, ‘leaving out Adam’. He thought the students expected from him a landscape background, and so decided to have a bower made up of laurel branches with oranges attached. However, there were penalties attached. He said, ‘My men were twice stopped coming from Hampstead with the green boughs.’ The police thought, ‘as was the case, they had robbed some gentleman’s grounds’. The gentleman was Constable, but he had to go to the magistrates to get the men released and pay a fine of ten shillings, perhaps for wasting police time.5 Constable invited Leslie to call at Charlotte Street and walk down to Somerset House with him and see the results of this wrong-doing for himself: ‘It is no small undertaking to make a Paradise of the Life Academy.’ Constable did an oil sketch of the Eve, seen from the rear, that his daughter Isabel later prudishly pruned to leave only the lovely head, with the girl’s hair up in a loose bun.6 Richard Redgrave thought that Constable was ambitious to prove to his Academy colleagues that, although a landscape painter, he could be an exemplary visitor in the Life School. The students evidently enjoyed his jibes and sallies.7 Henry Sass, who also attended as a mature participant in the Life classes, on one occasion took along to Constable’s studio W.P. Frith, a student from his nearby art school. Frith noticed that Constable had various natural items lying around – a bit of tree, some weeds, a bunch of dock leaves. They were apparently touchstones. Constable told him not to do anything without nature to hand. Walking away afterwards and discussing the neglect Constable’s work suffered, Sass told Frith, ‘The day will come when Constable will be understood.’8
By the time his Visitorship duties were over at the end of January 1831, Constable was plagued by his long-lasting cold. His six-footer of Salisbury Cathedral was slowed down. Several oil sketches had preceded the finished work and several drawings made on his last visits to the Fishers in 1829 came in handy. What John Fisher called the ‘Church under a cloud’ had long been a favourite subject. One oil sketch – roughly fourteen
by twenty inches, now in Tate Britain – was in fact in his lightest manner, almost watercolour-like. In the finished work, a quadrant of a rainbow arches across the storm clouds and touches down on Leydenhall. Certainly Fisher’s uncle the Bishop would have been perturbed by the mass of angry sky. It was the year before the passing of the great Reform Bill, and whether Constable was alluding to Church/State problems is uncertain. The good fortune suggested by the rainbow had perhaps a more personal implication. Constable knew Thomson’s poem ‘Summer’, in which a thunderstorm passes over and a young woman named Amelia is struck by lightning and dies in her lover’s arms. In the RA catalogue he quoted Thomson’s lines about the storm’s aftermath: tumultuous clouds, interminable sky, a purer azure ‘and a clearer calm’:
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