As for his second offering, it was a watercolour which Constable had told Leslie about the previous September: ‘I have made a beautifull drawing of Stonehenge. I venture to use such an expression to you.’ Stonehenge was large for a watercolour, about fifteen by twenty-two inches. The standing, tilting, and fallen stones, and a few small figures, were spotlit against a tempestuous purple-black cloud with the inner and outer bands of a rainbow arching down in the background. (He told Lucas about this time that he had been ‘very busy with rainbows, and very happy doing them’.) A hare scuttled across the sheep-trimmed grass. In the Academy catalogue Constable described part at least of what he had in mind: ‘The mysterious monument of Stonehenge, standing remote on a bare and boundless heath, as much unconnected with the events of past ages as it is with the uses of the present, carries you back beyond all historical records …’ The watercolour made use of preliminary studies, two drawings and two watercolours, several of which he squared up for transfer, together with a pencil drawing he had done in 1820 while staying with the Fishers in which the great stones cast black shadows in the same way as the gnomon of a sundial. In the Academy watercolour he made the stones slightly smaller in terms of the whole picture, though the sky and weather increased the sense of surrounding drama. The contemplative shepherd and speeding hare offered a contrast to the stones: time present, time past. The hare seems to have been a late arrival; it was painted on a small piece of paper cut to a more or less hare-shape and pasted on. (Turner’s Mortlake Terrace of 1827 had a pasted-on dog; his Rain, Steam and Speed of 1844 contained a hare that seemed, like Constable’s, to suggest natural vitality.) Constable’s sky was unique; it showed no obvious influence of his 1820s sky studies. The Literary Gazette declared ‘the effect with which Mr Constable has judiciously invested his subject, is as marvelous and mysterious as the subject itself’. It is interesting to see him reinvolved with watercolours at this stage, perhaps finding them easier to manage than oils following his rheumatic fever.8
A farewell dinner for the Academy took place on 20 July in the Great Room at Somerset House after the close of the exhibition. Constable was on hand in ‘the dear old house’ along with the President. Sir Martin Archer Shee was about to defend the RA before a parliamentary committee inquiring into its procedures and Constable was among those who applauded Shee’s staunchness.9 (Haydon – no friend of the Academy – would give evidence in August before the committee and while he approved of the instruction in the Antique School, he totally disapproved of the rotating system of Visitors in the Life School, citing as an extraordinary example of the teaching methods ‘a very celebrated landscape painter’ who caused laughter by bringing in some lemon and orange trees and setting them round a naked Eve. Constable’s 1831 arrangement had, as noted, been popular with the students.)10 In any event, at the farewell dinner Constable dined with many of his fellows, including Wilkie, Callcott, Stanfield, Leslie, and Etty. Chantrey gave the toast: ‘The Old Walls of the Academy.’ Turner, believed to be opposed to the move to Trafalgar Square, was among the absentees. He had set off on one of his frequent summer tours abroad, this time through France to the Alps with Hugh Munro for company.11 The Academy Life School stayed on at Somerset House until March 1837 when it moved into the Academy’s new quarters in the same building as the National Gallery. Constable was one of the members chosen to be Visitors of the Life School in its last Somerset House session.
Constable was sixty on 11 June 1836. How old did he feel? He was looking forward to Charley’s return from his first voyage. Minna and Isabel were in Wimbledon and Constable visited them there, before they rejoined Emily, Alfred and Lionel with Mrs Roberts in Hampstead. Young John had gained a certificate for his chemistry studies and went off to spend five summer weeks at Flatford, ‘fishing and rowing all day and reading when it is wet’, his father told Emily in a letter from Charlotte Street written with a cat called Kellery perched on his shoulder. He went on, ‘A little black and white kitten was let down into the area in a woolen bag yesterday morning early’ – evidently by someone who knew the Constable family liked cats. ‘It is very thin … Kellery is very jealous.’12 Constable still hadn’t got up to Suffolk to see his new property. He delivered his last lecture in Hampstead on 25 July and arranged to have nine pictures sent to an exhibition in Worcester. The local paper there was struck by ‘the wonderful effect’ made by Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows – Summer Afternoon and A Farmyard by a Navigable River in Suffolk – Summer Morning, painted by ‘the same great master’.13
Charley had a short spell of shore leave when the Buckinghamshire docked. His first voyage had left its mark on the boy, so his father told George Constable in Arundel. ‘All his visionary and poetic ideas of the sea & a seaman’s life are fled – the reality now only remains, and a dreadful thing the reality is, a huge & hideous floating mass.’ Charley’s self-discipline and sense of order had been improved, however – ‘an advantage [to] a youth of ardent mind & one who has never been controlled’. The Buckinghamshire was now going to China. Constable paid a firm of shipping agents the sizeable sum of £75 for Charley’s accommodation and mess bills as a midshipman.14 He asked Lucas to send a copy of the new engraving of Dedham Vale (or the painting itself) so Charley could see it before he sailed, but if Lucas couldn’t manage this, ‘never mind – only he may never see it again’. Constable feared losing Charley rather than Charley losing him (his misgivings also surfaced in several ink sketches of ships in storms done at this time). Yet an awareness of the possibility of his own demise could be found in a profoundly gloomy letter written to a collector friend, a Mr Stewart – apparently a Hampstead neighbour – for whom he had painted a small picture of the Heath. Charley’s ship was still in the Thames estuary in late November, held up by bad weather rather than fog this time. Constable told Stewart that he himself was ‘so much invalided that I have not been allowed to leave the house … I am not in the best of spirits. The parting with my dear sailor boy – for so long a time that God knows if we ever meet again in this world – the various anxieties and the fear of the world, & its attacks on my dear children after I am gone & they have no protection, all these things make me sad.’ And he added, ‘I want to stick to my easil – but cannot.’15
When the Buckinghamshire got away, it was to run immediately into more fierce weather. Charley reported to his father shocking scenes in their storm-refuge anchorage off the Nore. Constable wrote to Leslie: ‘One large ship floated past them bottom upwards, & after the gale he saw 7 large hulls in tow with steamboats & some on the Goodwins [sandbanks] and some on the beach under the Foreland. The captain [Captain Hopkins again] gave him praise for his conduct in the weather mizen topsail ear-ring, and getting down the rigging in the gale, Charley’s post of honor.’ Constable felt fear, and pride, for Charley, and a vicarious excitement. He accompanied his words with a nervously messy little sketch of Charley’s station aloft, attending to the mizzen topsail. The sketch would have left Leslie little the wiser despite his passages with Captain Morgan – whose Philadelphia, Constable reported, was a miraculous survivor of the same storm.
Jack Bannister, good old friend, had died on 7 November; this didn’t improve Constable’s morale. There would be no more of Bannister’s songs and puns. Constable dined with Leslie and Wilkie on 1 December and recalled meeting Wilkie when they were students at the Academy. He remembered Wilkie saying that he was following his Scottish master’s advice, borrowed from Reynolds, to be industrious if you were short of genius. Wilkie was as modest as always and as usual seemed to put Constable into a nostalgic frame of mind.16 Wilkie around this time told Constable that he ought to paint ‘a large picture for over the line’ for the next Academy exhibition.17 Constable a week later heard from the collector and clothing manufacturer John Sheepshanks that he wanted Constable’s Glebe Farm, ‘one of the pictures on which I rest my little pretensions to futurity’. Would it be all right to ask 150 pounds for it, Constable enquired from Leslie. Sheepshanks’s ges
ture was generous, since Constable had just declined to paint a companion picture for a William Collins the collector owned, a painting which Constable said had ‘nothing to do with the art’. At Sheepshanks’s mansion in Blackheath he viewed the many pictures: Wilkie’s two looked beautiful; the more than a score of Mulreadys were ‘less disagreeable than usual’; Turner’s five were ‘grand’ but evidently not long for this world – some of his best work, said Constable, was ‘swept up off the carpet every morning by the maid and put onto the dust hole’.18
Constable was again in the midst of a tormented attempt to alter – or get Lucas to alter – a large mezzotint of Salisbury Cathedral. Dark clouds loomed behind the spire; the whole thing was ‘too heavy’. A number of corrections were still required in November. On 9 December he said the most recent proof was effective but ‘the flash of lightning over the north transept’ should be emphasised. On the last day of 1836, although he was once more sadly disturbed by the stormy sky, he couldn’t think why he had suggested a change. Lucas needed money and asked for a loan of two pounds. With an hour and a quarter to go before midnight, and 1837 imminent, Constable wrote enclosing two sovereigns and his good wishes to Mrs Lucas, who was about to have a baby. ‘God preserve your excellent wife, and give her a happy hour – I have not forgot my own anxieties at such a time though they are never to return to me.’ He ended with the words, ‘You have caused the Old Year to slip through my hands with pleasurable feelings … Farewell.’ But six weeks later the print, now called The Rainbow – Salisbury Cathedral, was still a bother. He wrote to Lucas, ‘I hope that obliging – and most strange & odd ruffian your printer, will be allowed to have just his own way in printing this plate – that is, now we see we must not be “too full.” It is as [he] says only fit for “a parcel of painters.” It will not be liked, any more than the English landscape, if it is too smutty.’19
Constable went for a New Year’s celebration at the Leslies’ on 2 January. For the Constable children it was like an ‘excursion into the country’. He insisted the Leslies allow him to return the hospitality two days later and that they come to share some venison the Countess of Dysart had sent. The other guests would be the family solicitor Anthony Spedding and Miss Spedding, who was fond of Minna.20 Constable closed his invitation with the words he said John Fisher had used to him in a request that he make a visit: ‘Prithee come – life is short – friendship sweet.’
23. Engaged with the Assassin (1837)
WITH THE NEW Year past, it was back to the easel. The canvas Constable worked on was to be called Arundel Mill and Castle. Mills never ceased to interest him and perhaps as he painted he heard the wheel going round, the rush of river water, the stones grinding within. While staying with the George Constables in July 1835 he had sat on the banks of Swanbourne Lake near Arundel and sketched this ancient powerhouse,1 which was far older than the stage-set castle. In 1836 he had borrowed back the sketch – a gift to George Constable – saying young John wanted him to make a painting of it, but The Cenotaph had come first.2 In mid-February 1837 he wrote to the Arundel brewer telling him he was indebted to him for the new work, ‘a beautiful subject … It is, and shall be, my best picture.’ He had six weeks before the Academy exhibition and felt easy about completing it in time. In the Mill and Castle he used a scene which he had told Leslie several years before was a wonderful natural landscape – ‘the trees are beyond everything beautifull’. One can see in the painting hints of his early addiction to Gainsborough, but even more, and less happily, reverberations from his other old hero, Rubens, to whom many of the painterly effects seem indebted. Not only Arundel Castle but the Chateau de Steen looms over Arundel Mill. There are of course Constable motifs – the boys fishing in a little creek at the lake’s edge remind us of other boys fishing in the Stour. Yet in recovering such things he gave the impression of trying too hard to improve on his old works, to improve the unimproveable, and the result was unnatural. The Swiss art historian J. Meier-Graefe later wrote that Constable, in his last larger pictures, ‘felt expression slipping away from him, and tried to indemnify himself by exaggeration of method’. Consequently he lost the freshness that existed in his sketches.3 The word ‘mannered’ once again came to mind. Even Constable began to have doubts about his ‘best picture’. On 25 February he told Leslie that he had been ‘sadly hindered … my picture is not worth any thing at the moment’.
Titian, not Rubens, was in Constable’s thoughts as he set up a scene for the Academy’s Life students to draw. He took over from Turner as Visitor at the end of February, and he wrote to Leslie that he would be ‘engaged with the “Assassin” all the following week’ – that is, with the figure of the murderer in Titian’s St Peter Martyr. A man named Fitzgerald was to be his model for the assassinated Dominican and another named Emmott the fleeing murderer, ‘an obliging well behaved man … who is anxious for a turn at the Academy’. He had to hand a print of the same subject based on a painting by Jacobello del Fiore, done five years before the Titian. He had made a point in his landscape lectures of the Titian’s significance in the process by which landscape painting unlinked itself from history painting and became an independent branch of art.
Constable’s tour of duty lasted until 25 March. He looked after the Life students from five p.m. until nine p.m. every evening in front of a model lit by oil lamps. The scene he set to follow the Assassination required a young woman. Etty, naturally interested in helping out, sent a note which amused the recipient:
Dear Constable,
A young figure is brought to me, who is very desirous of becoming a model. She is very much like the Amazon and all in front remarkable fine.
The apprentice model was seventeen. For her, Constable put aside a more experienced female named Welham who had been promised the job but had in some way misbehaved; moreover (he told Leslie) she was ‘a sad story teller, and gossip, & old and worn out in figure’.4 Clearly not remarkably fine.
Looking after the Life class was a strenuous job after a day’s painting. It was a long winter, with deep snow in Charlotte Street, the fogs thick with coal smoke. There was much influenza about and Constable advised Samuel Lane to keep his children at home because of the bitter weather – ‘nothing breeds whooping cough so much’. His own family escaped illness although he worried about young John, ‘the most tender of us all’, still working hard for his Cambridge entrance. His girls were all well and happy at ‘that excellent woman’s, Miss Noble’, where Mrs Roberts went to see them from time to time. He attended the first RA general meeting to be held at ‘the new house’. Many thought William Wilkins’s building too low-key and by no means big enough for the National Gallery (in the west half) and the Royal Academy (in the east), crammed in together.5 But Constable called it ‘very noble’. His last Life class session took place in Somerset House on 25 March, a Saturday. He treated it to his usual humorous interjections. Richard Redgrave, who was there along with Etty, painting from the model, said that Constable ‘indulged in the vein of satire he was so fond of’.6 At the end of the evening – not just his last evening as Visitor but the last such get-together in the old house – he gave a brief talk to the students about what caused the arts to prosper or fail. One factor that led to success was the right sort of instruction; one that led to disappointment was trust in false principles. The Academy had advantages as the cradle of British Art; students shouldn’t rush to European schools instead. The best school of art existed where the best artists lived, not where the largest number of old masters were displayed. Some people thought the French were best at drawing. Yet remember what Stothard had said: ‘The French are very good mathematical draughtsmen, but life and motion are the essence of drawing, and their figures remind us too much of statues.’ Constable asked the students to show in their work that they had imbibed the Academy principles which would honour the new establishment and their country, then he thanked them for their diligent attention during his Visitorship. At this the students stood and cheered him heart
ily.7
After this he had a busy few days. Among his visitors in Charlotte Street was a recent Academy student, Alfred Tidey, who had watched him working on The Cenotaph. Tidey became a painter of miniature portraits, his subjects including Minna and Charley. On 28 March Tidey found Constable happily absorbed in his Arundel Mill and Castle. He gave it a touch here and there with his palette knife and then stepped back to judge the effect, saying, ‘It is neither too warm nor too cold, too light nor too dark, and this constitutes everything in a picture.’ Constable asked Tidey to stay to dinner and answered questions about the Academy’s new quarters by sketching a rough floor plan.8 On the following day Constable wrote to Lucas about the Salisbury Cathedral mezzotint; he was particularly pleased with the rainbow, which they had been fussing over. He said that he was planning to go to a general assembly of the Academy the next evening, Thursday, and would dine on Saturday with John Fisher’s father at the Charterhouse, the school and almshouse in a former City monastery.9
On the Thursday Constable met Leslie at the Academy and after the assembly walked part of the way home with him. It was a fine night but very cold. In Oxford Street they heard a child crying and Constable crossed the street to see what was wrong. It was a little beggar girl who had hurt her knee. Leslie watched as Constable gave her a shilling and some sympathetic words. These, Leslie said, ‘by stopping her tears, showed that the hurt was not very serious’. As they walked on, Constable – perhaps thinking about the giving of money – complained about some losses he had had recently, small enough but a nuisance because the people involved took advantage of his good feelings. Constable had gone well out of his way for Leslie but they parted cheerfully at the west end of Oxford Street to take their separate routes home.10
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