Minna’s bout of scarlet fever preoccupied him during June, and he was already alarmed about the condition of another person close to him – Johnny Dunthorne. On 22 June Constable wrote to Leslie, ‘Poor John Dunthorne is getting daily, nay hourly worse – he cannot long remain to me.’ Note the ‘to me’ – it would be a personal loss when it came. On 6 July, when Johnny’s legs were so swollen he could hardly walk, Constable added: ‘I shall lose a sincere friend, whose attachment to me has been like a sons from his infancy. He is without a fault & so much the fitter for heaven. I woke in the night about him.’ Constable frequently went to Grafton Street to check on Johnny, but each melancholy visit took him a day to get over. Johnny knew he’d had it; he was saddened that he was being removed from the world just as he was succeeding in it. Leslie believed that Johnny had heart disease, though Constable thought a ‘dropsical complaint’ was involved.
The immediate calamity struck elsewhere. In the winter of 1829/30 John Fisher had been unwell with ‘gout, asthma, and fulness of blood in the head’. The correspondence of the two friends seems to have faltered, though in 1831, before the RA exhibition, Fisher suggested some Latin tags for the catalogue, one of which Constable adopted for his English Landscape prospectus. In August 1832 Fisher went to northern France with his wife hoping for a change for the better. They had been in Boulogne a week when Fisher was seized by violent spasms. These began one day at 4 a.m. and went on for several hours. Then he slept almost continuously until eleven that night, when he suddenly stopped breathing. Fisher was forty-five. ‘Suppressed Gout’ was blamed first of all, though later Constable was told the cause of death was cholera. He wrote to Leslie of the ‘sudden and awfull event’:
The closest intimacy had subsisted for many years between us – we loved each other and confided in each other entirely – and his loss means a sad gap in my life & worldly prospects – he would have helped my children, for he was a good adviser though impetuous, and a truly religious man – God bless him till we meet again …
Fisher – the privileged but perceptive cleric – had been Constable’s first major patron and best friend. Their friendship hadn’t suffered but rather had been reaffirmed when need for cash forced Fisher to sell paintings back to Constable. Although Fisher never got his dedication in English Landscape, the letterpress describing its frontispiece recalled Fisher’s uncle the Bishop, sometime vicar of Langham, along with Sir George Beaumont, seasonal visitor in Dedham, as influences in Constable’s life. Through much of their acquaintance the younger Fisher seems to have been a more spontaneous letter writer than Constable, but it was to Fisher that the artist presented some of his memorable thoughts: the sound of water escaping from mill dams, and painting being but another word for feeling – thoughts in which sensory detail and recollection were as bound up as in Proust’s remembrance of the madeleine. Fisher had resolutely backed the hesitating painter when his prospective marriage to Maria seemed in peril; he had applauded Constable for aiming high – ‘your fame is your Pole Star’; and he had for a long time helped hold Constable’s head above water. Bishop Fisher, ‘the kindly monitor’, had passed on, and now so had the nephew who had frequently given Constable the chance to show that he was not only a great artist but a good man. Memories crowded in: Fisher conducting the marriage service in St Martin-in-the-Fields; walking on the beach in Weymouth bay; recommending Gilbert White’s Selborne; making sermons, listening to gossip, talking to wives and children … ‘I cannot tell how singularly his death has affected me,’ Constable closed his letter to Leslie.
Constable took refuge with his children in Hampstead where (he told Mary Fisher a little later) he felt Maria’s presence; he seemed ‘still to live in the society of my departed Angel’. He spent a week copying a winter landscape by Jacob van Ruysdael; the stay-at-home Dutch painters were often in his thoughts at this time, as were the works of the much-travelled Flemish artist-diplomat Rubens. The Ruysdael had been lent by Sir Robert Peel, scion of a Lancashire industrial family and Tory minister who had brought in Catholic emancipation. Peel said Constable could borrow the Ruysdael as long as he didn’t copy it exactly; Constable added a dog. He also got consolation from a copy of a small Pieter de Hooch that Leslie sent, a painting of a room in Delft lit up by a sunbeam. He told Leslie that the best proof of its excellence was that nothing in it could be changed, ‘either in place, or light, or dark, or color – either warm or cold’. Trying to get through this bleak time, he wrote to Lucas saying he had added a ruin to the little Glebe Farm as a symbol of himself (and of his English Landscape).21
One person Constable encountered occasionally in Charlotte Street was his neighbour and one-time friend R.R. Reinagle. Reinagle was later to claim that Constable had been his pupil. He said he had taught Constable ‘the whole Art of Painting’ and that ‘when his father, who was a rich miller at Bergholt in Suffolk, dismissed him from his house for loving the Art as a profession, I received him into my house for 6 months, & furnished him everything he wanted – even money’.22 Reinagle was a skilful copyist of old masters and competent portrait painter. He had been a full Academician since 1823, six years before his so-called pupil. But he had qualities that Frith might have featured in a Road to Ruin. He often held sales of his own paintings and of purported old masters. On 20 and 21 June 1832, according to a sign nailed to his house at 54 Charlotte Street, three hundred extravagantly attributed pictures were to be auctioned there. Reinagle arranged an evening opening ‘for the nobility’, and laid on a band of drums, trumpets, and hand organs for musical entertainment. Constable felt a good deal of schadenfreude when the sale wasn’t a success. He wrote to Leslie: ‘The result of Reinagles puffing has been that nearly the whole of the pictures are left on his hands, enough not selling to pay his expenses … The whole mess has been (as I hope such things ever will be) a totall failure.’ But he sounded genuinely sad in June 1835 when he wrote to young Boner that ‘poor’ Reinagle’s bankruptcy had been announced. Reinagle continued to live by his wits. In 1848 he exhibited at the Academy as his own painting a marine picture by J.W. Arnold that he had bought at a dealer’s and altered slightly. The deception was discovered, and Reinagle had to resign his RA membership.23
Meanwhile, Johnny Dunthorne was failing completely and by early October he was confined to bed. Constable looked in from time to time; he brought his copy of the Peel Ruysdael for Johnny to see. Johnny died on Friday 2 November at 4 p.m., aged thirty-four. ‘He fought a good fight,’ Constable told Lucas, ‘and I think must have left the world with as few regrets as any man of his age I ever met with.’ He wrote to Leslie, ‘His loss makes a gap that cannot be filled up with me in this world. So with poor Fisher. I am unfortunate in my friendships.’ Constable went down to Suffolk to attend Johnny’s ‘last scene’; he stayed at Flatford with Abram and Mary. The Reverend Rowley delivered the funeral sermon taking his text from Isaiah IV, 21: ‘In that day shall the branch of the Lord be beautiful and glorious, and the fruit of the earth shall be excellent and comely for them that are escaped of Israel.’ Perhaps the stately language and high words flying over their heads gave some traditional comfort, but Johnny’s distraught father told Constable not long after that he didn’t care ‘how soon he was laid in the same grave with poor John’. (It was 1844 when this reunion occurred; the Dunthorne tomb is on the street side of the East Bergholt graveyard.) Dunthorne Senior continued to prize a large telescope Johnny had made and thereafter made a point of showing it to callers at his house in the village. For Johnny there were no more stars.24
In the coach going back to London on 13 November Constable travelled with two other gentlemen. Passing across the vale of Dedham, he remarked how beautiful it was and one of his fellow passengers said, ‘Yes, sir, this is Constable’s country.’ Constable then felt bound to introduce himself lest something more was said that spoiled the moment.25
18. A Summer’s Morning (1833–34)
EARLY IN 1833 Constable was working – not too happily – on two pain
tings. One was a house-portrait, not his favourite line of work, the subject being Englefield House which belonged to a wealthy Berkshire landowner, Richard Benyon de Beauvoir. ‘My house tires me very much,’ he wrote to Leslie. ‘The window frames & chimneys & chimney pots are endless – but I shall fill the canvas beyond repentence.’ The other was a painting of the monument commemorating Joshua Reynolds that Sir George Beaumont had set up in the grounds of Coleorton. But though the idea for this picture was, like that for the Waterloo, of long standing, dating from his first visit to Beaumont’s estate in 1823, it seemed to bring on gloom and irritability. And this mood was accompanied by a cold. He put The Cenotaph aside and wrote again to Leslie:
I am determined not to harrass [sic] my mind and HEALTH by scrambling over my canvas … Why should I – I have little to lose and nothing to gain. I ought to respect myself – for my friends’ sake, who love me – and my children. It is time at ‘56’ to begin at least to know ‘one’s self’ – and I do know what I am not, and your regard for me has at least awakened me to beleive in the possibility that I may yet make some impression with my ‘light’ – my ‘dews’ – my ‘breezes’ – my ‘bloom’ and my ‘freshness’ – no one of which qualities has yet been perfected on the canvas of any painter in this world.
Painting it seems was also but another way of wrecking one’s well-being.
Constable’s children were once again among his main anxieties. Despite inscribing their names in the family Bible in November 1831,1 as if to give them permanence, he knew by how thin a thread life hung for them all. He had taken the eldest boys to a lecture on volcanoes in mid-July 1832 that fascinated them but made Constable conclude, ‘We inhabit a fearful planet’. His first-born John Charles still worried them with his frailty, although by March 1832 he seemed improved by the Hampstead air. Yet the boy often walked in his sleep and during one episode in midsummer hurt an arm – he had apparently been trying to move a chest of drawers. In July 1832 his second son Charley was sick, frightening Constable, though Dr Evans told him not to be alarmed ‘for now’. Constable, trying to be father and mother both (with much help from Roberts), found it difficult to follow this instruction. Each child’s birthday brought to mind their mother, his dear departed Maria: if she could see them now! But thank God for Boner. When Pitt wasn’t available Boner carried messages to Leslie and Lucas. At 35 Charlotte Street, where Constable attempted to pull his family together in early 1833, Boner opened the door to visitors and decided whom to let in. He also packed up sets of English Landscape, did proof-reading, and began to tutor Alfred and Lionel as well as the older boys.2 Constable’s own efforts at educating his sons included taking them to see John Beauchamp’s foundry in Holborn: ‘forges – smelting potts – metals – turning lathes – straps & bellows – coals, ashes, dust – dirt – & cinders – and every thing else that is agreable to boys’. Made happy by the place where Mr Beauchamp manufactured Britannia Metal, the Constable boys wanted their father to fit out such a workshop for them in the cellar under his painting room.
Constable’s son, John Charles
A proper full-time education was elusive. For a while in early 1833 Constable thought of putting young John Charles in the hands of Daniel Whalley, his sister Martha’s son, a recent Cambridge graduate who was waiting for a curacy, to tutor him in maths and classics.3 There was a plan to ship Charley off to Mr Wilkin’s school near East Bergholt. But nothing came of these notions. Constable may have been school-hunting when he stopped at Hastings in 1833 and did a watercolour of East Hill near that town, a sketch designed to show the various strata that would interest the fossil-hunter John Charles. The school he eventually found was not far away in Folkestone, run by Reverend Thomas Pierce (or Pearce), recommended by Constable’s cousin Jane South – her son Burton was a pupil there. Constable was in his usual two minds about this; his views on boarding schools were deeply embedded. But brother Abram encouraged the Folkestone scheme and Constable finally agreed. Boner took Charley down, calling at Dover to look at the castle on the way, and bearing a letter to Reverend Pierce expressing more than normal parental concerns. Charley’s ‘peculiar disposition and habits’ were addressed, together with his ‘natural ardor and activity of mind and habit’. (That is, he was an energetic, untidy, sometimes hard-to-control eleven-going on twelve-year-old boy who found it hard to concentrate.) ‘He has never been treated with severity,’ Constable told the headmaster, no doubt remembering the Lavenham ‘lash’; and he enclosed a letter from Mr Drew about his son’s health. Charley’s prospects at the Pierce academy didn’t seem to be dented by this flurry of fatherly concern or a subsequent admonition from Constable to ‘pray be good and do not spoil your cloathes in sea water’. Charley was in fact attracted to salt water from the start. His sketch of an East Indiaman running up the Channel showed that he was soon getting down to the beach at Folkestone. The experiment with Charles worked to such an extent that Constable decided that John, now fifteen, could go to the Reverend Pierce’s, too.4
Young John had taken up science – he was particularly interested in anatomy and geology, in minerals and fossils. He wrote to his brother Charles in May telling him he had been dissecting a frog and in early June asked him to look in ‘stratum super stratum if there is any chalk, you will find the best fossils there’. When he joined Charley (who was more interested in insects than chalk) at school in Folkestone in the autumn, he requested Boner to make sure new issues of the British Cyclopedia and a periodical on botany were kept for him at Charlotte Street. ‘No wonder the ancients worshipped the sea! I wish you would go and look in the clay they dig up out of the wel [the Weald] for fossils.’5 Darwin, at that point a believer in the Bible’s view of Creation, set sail on his nearly five-year voyage on the Beagle at the end of 1831, but taking with him Volume I of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, which proposed that the earth had been produced by geological forces over aeons of time – and not in an Old Testament timescale. Many thoughtful people, like Philip Gosse, were examining nature intently while trying to make their findings fit traditional religion. Constable himself had become interested in geology. When he went with the two eldest boys to East Bergholt at the beginning of August, he told Leslie that ‘we ranged the woods and feilds, and searched the clay pits of Suffolk for the bones, and skulls, & teeth of fossil animals, for John – & Charles made drawings and I did nothing at all.’ Doing nothing! – a novel admission for Constable. Was the spring winding down or was he truly happy, as he claimed, not to be painting but simply watching the boys enjoying themselves? That Charles was drawing gave him immense pleasure. Leslie had heard in April from the proud father the good news about ‘dear Charley – my son who is transported. He has sold his first picture – a drawing (God knows what it is) is bought by the Curate of Folkestone for one shilling – ready money, I dare say.’ When Constable’s new acquaintance George Constable came on the scene, two of his qualities that Constable approved of were that he was interested in the English Landscape prints and was ‘a sensible man in all matters of science’. The Arundel brewer specially endeared himself by sending young John a box of fossils, which the boy prized. Constable thanked his near namesake and added: ‘To me these pieces of “time-mangled matter” are interesting for the tale they tell; but above all, I esteem them as marks of regard to my darling boy …’6
Young John’s new-boy period at the Pierces made Constable nervous. He told Leslie, ‘To part with my dear John is breaking my heart – but I am told it is for his good.’ He wrote to the boy enclosing ‘a hasty sketch’ of a great stone his uncle Abram had sent down for him from Flatford, but was soon more than usually alarmed when young John, in the new circumstances of the school, went sleepwalking again, fell, and injured his leg and hip. For a time this injury seemed to get worse. On 10 October Constable travelled to Folkestone to be with his sons, bring fruit and cakes Boner had sent, and stayed a fortnight. Young John wrote to Boner (now tutoring Alfie and Lionel) reminding him to guard his preci
ous magazines and adding, ‘You must not think my leg is quite well. Yesterday Mr Knight cut it to let the matter out. I can not put my foot to the ground, it has been allmost 3 weeks, and I have had on it a 114 leaches, and for a week I had nothing to eat …’ The leeches were Mr Knight’s method of reducing inflammation. Boner then sent down some money, for Constable was ‘almost high & dry’, and had had to borrow from John – he, his father noted, ‘is always prudent & carefull – so like his Mother and so little like me’. Constable was also forced to take an interest in the behaviour of Burton South, young John’s cousin and fellow pupil. Burty had a scapegrace reputation and was blamed for encouraging Charles Constable to spend all his pocket money on ‘eatables and such like foolings’. Burty seems to have been the instigator of an extra-curricular walking expedition with Charles to Dover. This, the older brother told the younger, might have given him a fever from walking fast in the heat of the sun ‘and might have kild you’. Burty was arraigned but the Pierce sentence allowed him to join Charles on the trip to London at the start of the summer holidays. Boner met them off the coach before they had a chance to abscond elsewhere.7
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