THE BROWN TREE
"A constant communion with pictures, the tints of which are subdued by
time, no doubt tends to unfit the eye for the enjoyment of freshness."
So wrote the wise Leslie in a chapter narrating certain passages of art
talk between Constable and Sir George Beaumont, when the painter was
visiting the amiable baronet at Cole-Orton. The modern world is a
little amused by Sir George Beaumont--collector, connoisseur, and
painter--who, in his own ripe person, precisely and accurately
exemplified Constable's criticism of certain French artists. "They
study (and they are very laborious students) pictures only." Sir
George loved art, as he understood the term, and it was not his fault
that he could not see eye to eye with the young vision of Constable.
Quite content and happy was Sir George; he did not wish to change.
Loved art? He had a passion for art. Did he not always carry with him
upon his journeys Claude's picture of "Hagar"? In 1826 he presented
"Hagar," which is now catalogued under the title of "Landscape with
Figures," to the nation; but he felt so disconsolate without his adored
picture that he begged to have it returned to him for his life-time.
That was done, and on Sir George's death in 1828 his widow restored
"Hagar" to the National Gallery. Study "Hagar," and you have the
measure of the art predilections of Sir George Beaumont, collector,
connoisseur, painter, patron, and friend of John Constable, and author
of the famous question, "Do you find it very difficult to determine
where to place your brown tree?"
Constable's answer is recorded. "Not in the least, for I never put
such a thing into a picture."
Sir George did. Observing the brown tree sprawling in the formal and
academic pictures he prized and copied, he reproduced it laboriously in
his own works. Apparently it never occurred to him that those brown
trees may once have been green.
"Sir George," says Leslie, "seemed to consider the autumnal tints
necessary, at least to some part of a landscape." And Leslie is the
authority for two oft-told stories about Gaspar Poussin and about the
Cremona fiddle.
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PLATE III.--THE CORNFIELD, OR COUNTRY LANE.
National Gallery.
Painted in 1826, and presented to the National Gallery in 1837 by an
association of gentlemen, who purchased it of the painter's executors.
A typical work. John Constable was pleased with his Cornfield.
Writing of it to Archdeacon Fisher, he said--"It is not neglected in
any part; the trees are more than usually studied, well defined as well
as the stems; they are shaken by a pleasant and healthful breeze at
noon."
[Illustration: PLATE III.--THE CORNFIELD, OR COUNTRY LANE.]
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Sir George having placed a small landscape by Gaspar Poussin on his
easel, close to a picture he was painting, said, "Now, if I can match
these tints I am sure to be right."
"But suppose," replied Constable, "Gaspar could rise from his grave, do
you think he would know his own picture in its present state? or if he
did, should we not find it difficult to persuade him that somebody had
not smeared tar or cart grease over its surface, and then wiped it
imperfectly off?"
The fiddle story can be told in fewer words. Sir George having
recommended the colour of an old Cremona fiddle for the prevailing tone
of everything in Nature, Constable answered by laying an old fiddle on
the green lawn before the house.
Sir George Beaumont was one of the last of the servile disciples of
Claude Lorraine and the Poussins, who conjured their followers into
believing that a landscape must be composed in the grand or "classical"
manner, and must conform to certain academic rules. Claude's drawings,
preserved in the British Museum, proclaim that he could be as frank,
delightful, and impulsive as Constable in his sketches; but when Claude
constructed a landscape of ruined temples and fatuous biblical or
legendary figures, the inspiration of his drawing usually evaporated.
Claude's genius remained, and there are pictures by him, notably "The
Enchanted Castle," that in their particular manner have never been
surpassed; but alas! it was not the genius that Sir George Beaumont
imitated, but Claude's mannerisms and limitations.
The stay-at-home Dutchmen who flooded the seventeenth century with
their simple, homely, and often beautiful landscapes had no attraction
for grandiose Sir George and his kin. The genius of Watteau which
flashed into the eighteenth century, the commanding performances of
Richard Wilson and Gainsborough in landscape, had no influence upon the
practitioners of the grand manner. And in truth those pioneers
suffered for their temerity. Wilson, who never quite cast off the
classical mantle, accepted with gratitude, at the height of his fame,
the post of librarian to the Royal Academy. Gainsborough would have
starved had he been obliged to depend upon landscape painting for a
living, and Constable would have been in financial straits had he been
obliged to depend for the support of his family entirely upon the sale
of his pictures.
Wilson died in 1782, Gainsborough in 1788, and J. R. Cozens, whom
Constable described as "the greatest genius who ever touched
landscape," in 1799; but the careers of these men cannot be said to
have influenced their landscape contemporaries. While Wilson,
Gainsborough, and Cozens were still alive, certain boys were growing up
in England, who were destined to make the nineteenth century splendid
with their landscape performances. What a galaxy of names! Old Crome
and James Ward were born in 1769; Turner and Girtin in 1775; Constable
in 1776. Cotman saw the light in 1782, the year of Wilson's death;
David Cox in 1783; Peter de Wint in 1784, and the short and brilliant
life of Bonington began in 1801. But landscape painting was still, and
was to remain for long, the Cinderella of the arts. In 1829 Cotman
wrote a letter beginning, "My eldest son is following the same
miserable profession."
Constable's British contemporaries being men of genius of various
degrees, men of individual vision, it is quite natural that his
influence upon them should have been almost negligible. Turner, Old
Crome, and Bonington owed nothing to Constable; but in France it was
different. In the early years of the nineteenth century when
Englishmen were producing magnificent work which was to bring them such
great posthumous fame and such small rewards during their lifetime,
landscape painting in France was still slumbering in classical
swathing-bands. As if frightened out of originality by the horrors of
the French Revolution of 1789, the landscape painters of France for
thirty years and more remained steeped in the apathy of classicism.
David (1748-1825) dominated the French art world, and no mere landscape
painter was able to dispel the heavy tradition that David imposed in
historical painting. True there were protestors, original men (there
always are), but they were powerless to stem the turgid stream. There
was Paul Huet and there was Georges Michel, happy no doubt in their
work, but unfortunate in living before their time. Michel, neglected,
misunderstood, was excluded from the Salon exhibitions after 1814, on
account of his revolutionary tendencies. We note signs of the brown
tree obsession in Michel's spacious and simple landscapes, but he
painted the environs of Paris, and did not give a thought to theatrical
renderings of Plutarch, Theocritus, Ovid, or Virgil.
France was ripe for Constable at that memorable Salon of 1824, simple,
straight-seeing Constable, who painted his Suffolk parish, not the
tumbling ruins of Italy, and who showed that "the sun shines, that the
wind blows, that water wets, and that air and light are everywhere."
But Constable's influence on the French painters, although great, must
not be overstated. Change was in the air. Herald signs had not been
lacking of the rebirth of French landscape painting. The French
critics of the Salons had already begun to complain of the stereotyped
classical ruins and brown-tree landscapes; they announced that they
were weary of "malarious lakes, desolate wastes, and terrible cliffs."
Joyfully they welcomed in the Salon of 1822 the brilliant water-colours
of Bonington, Copley Fielding, and other Englishmen, and then came 1824
with Constable showing that the bright, fresh colours were also
possible in oil, and that a fine picture could be made out of an
"unpicturesque locality," a lock, a cottage, a hay-wain, a cornfield,
quite as well as from a "Plague among the Philistines at Ashdod," or an
"Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba."
As has been already explained, Constable did not dream of the success
and fame that was in store for him in Paris. "The Hay Wain" was
painted in 1821; he was then forty-five, and as will be seen from the
following letter written in 1822, he had not found art remunerative.
"I have some nibbles at my large picture of 'The Hay Wain' in the
British Gallery. I have an offer of seventy pounds without the frame
to form part of an exhibition in Paris. I hardly know what to do. It
might promote my fame and procure me commissions, but it is the
property of my family; though I want money dreadfully; and, on this
subject, I must beg a great favour of you, indeed, I can do it of no
other person. The loan of twenty pounds or thirty pounds would be of
the greatest use to me at this time, as painting these large pictures
has much impoverished me."
In 1824 the nibble became a bite. "The Hay Wain" with the two other
pictures was sold "to a Frenchman" for two hundred and fifty pounds.
The Frenchman's object was to make a show of them in Paris. He did so
to some purpose. And it is odd to note that the name of this farseeing
Frenchman has never been disclosed.
Above "The Hay Wain" in the National Gallery hangs James Ward's fine
picture called "View of Harlech Castle and surrounding landscape."
That is the official title, but I suggest that the title should be,
"The End of the Brown Tree." You will observe that the brown tree has
been cut down and is being hurried away in a cart drawn by four grey
horses. I do not accuse the Director of the National Gallery of
joking; but I cannot think it was altogether without intention that, in
the rehanging of the room, James Ward's allegory of the end of the
Brown Tree should have been hung above Constable's "Hay Wain," the
pioneer picture of the new movement.