HIS LIFE
Constable had a happy, uneventful life and a quiet death. A happy
life? Yes. For the loss of friends and the depression of spirits that
clouded his closing years are events that happen to not a few who have
lived the major portion of their lives pleasantly and successfully.
Practical, level-headed, industrious, there is no hint of the
aberrations or eccentricities of genius in the orderly and fruitful
sixty-one years of his existence, which began in 1776, and ended in
1837.
Probably the severest blow in his life was the death of his wife in
1828, leaving him with seven children. It came, almost without
warning, the year after the family had settled so contentedly in Well
Walk, Hampstead.
"This house," he wrote, "is to my wife's heart's content; it is
situated on an eminence at the back of the spot in which you saw us,
and our little drawing-room commands a view unsurpassed in Europe, from
Westminster Abbey to Gravesend. The dome of St Paul's in the air seems
to realise Michael Angelo's words on seeing the Pantheon; 'I will build
such a thing in the sky.'" After his wife's death Constable returned
to his former residence in Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square; but he
retained Well Walk, and often sojourned there.
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PLATE IV.--FLATFORD MILL ON THE RIVER STOUR.
National Gallery.
Painted in 1817. Constable was then forty-one, a somewhat mature age
for a man to produce what may fairly be called his first important
work. It is a picture of England--ripe, lush, carefully composed,
carefully executed, but fresh as are the meadows on the banks of the
Stour; and the sky, across which the large clouds are drifting, is
sunny.
[Illustration: PLATE IV.--FLATFORD MILL ON THE RIVER STOUR.]
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Probably the greatest surprise, and certainly one of the most
comforting episodes of his life, was the receipt of a legacy of twenty
thousand pounds on the death of his wife's father, which elicited the
remark that now he could "stand before a six-foot canvas with a mind at
ease, thank God!"
Constable developed slowly as a painter, but having once found himself
he strode steadily onward, knowing exactly what he meant to do, turning
neither to the right nor to the left, indifferent to tradition,
schools, and influences. Consequently the earlier years of his life,
when he was breaking away from tradition and beginning to see things
with his own eyes are the more interesting. He was born at East
Bergholt in Suffolk on 11th June 1776, the second son of Golding
Constable, owner of water and wind mills. At the Dedham Grammar School
he was renowned for his penmanship, and before he left school, at
seventeen years of age, he had already shown a strong inclination
towards painting. In this he was encouraged by his friend John
Dunthorne, plumber and glazier, a man of parts, who devoted his leisure
time to landscape painting.
Fate was complaisant to Constable. Born in an opulent and wooded
quarter of Suffolk, on a spot overlooking the fertile valley of the
Stour, with a friend close at hand who loved Nature and painted her for
pleasure not for profit, can we wonder that, later in life, Constable
wrote enthusiastically and gratefully of "the scenes of my boyhood
which made me a painter." A painter he was from the beginning, for his
father's proposal that he should take Orders was never really seriously
entertained, and the year that he spent as a miller was surely of more
service to him as a student of Nature than if he had spent the period
as a student in an art school. As a miller, the "handsome miller" he
was called, he learnt at first hand the ways of winds, clouds, and
storms; in an art school he would have learned how his predecessors had
decided that antique statues should be drawn and "shaded." Yes;
everything conspired to make John Constable "a natural painter." The
art schools would serve him later, but that year as a miller watching
the skies, noting the winds, observing the growth of crops, and the
demeanour of trees, was the foundation of his originality. He was but
sixteen--that impressionable period when everything is new, and the
eyes of body and soul absorb and retain. In that fresh and impulsive
sketch called "Spring," now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, he
painted, later in life, one of the mills in which he worked, upon the
timbers of which he had carved the words "John Constable, 1792." In
the second edition of his "Life," published in 1845, Leslie says that
the name and date, neatly carved with a penknife, "still remain."
Leslie also prints Constable's description of this "Spring" sketch
which was engraved by David Lucas.
"It may perhaps give some idea of one of those bright silvery days in
the spring, when at noon large garish clouds surcharged with hail or
sleet sweep with their broad shadows the fields, woods, and hills; and
by their depths enhance the value of the vivid greens and yellows so
peculiar to the season. The _natural history_, if the expression may
be used, of the skies, which are so particularly marked in the hail
squalls at this time of the year, is this...." Then follows a lengthy
and intimate study of _the natural history_ of the skies, showing what
stores of knowledge he had amassed during the year he worked as a
miller. Is it exaggeration to describe that year as the most important
of his life. It gave him the independent outlook, the rough intimacy
with fields and hedgerows under the influences of light and weather,
that new-old knowledge which so astonished the French artists at the
Salon of 1824. Constable began with the skies of Nature, he went on to
study the skies of Claude, Ruysdael, and other masters; but he returned
to the skies and pastures of Nature, never to leave them again.
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PLATE V.--DEDHAM MILL. Victoria and Albert Museum.
Painted in 1820, three years after "Flatford Mill." Constable's father
was the owner of the watermills at Flatford and Dedham. Many years
before the date of this picture, Constable, writing of a landscape of
Dedham by an acquaintance, said--"It is very well painted, and there is
plenty of light without any light at all." In "Dedham Mill," he
progresses in his purpose to infuse true light into his pictures.
[Illustration: PLATE V.--DEDHAM MILL.]
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Here is a further episode of Constable's youth before he visited
London, another example of the luck, there is no other word for it,
that attended his art beginnings. The Dowager Lady Beaumont lived at
Dedham, where Golding Constable owned a water-mill, and as the families
were friendly, Constable early made the acquaintance of her son, Sir
George Beaumont, who was twenty-three years his senior. He had already
approved of some copies made by the youth in pen and ink after
Dorigny's engravings of the cartoons of Raphael, and he had showed him
the "Hagar" by Claude, already mentioned, which Sir George always
carried about with him when he travelled. What was still more
important, he displayed before his protege thirty water-colours by
Girtin. The Claude and the array of Girtins produced an enormous
impression upon young Constable. In Claude he made acquaintance with
an old master, who had been the first to paint pure landscape in the
approved grand or classical manner; in Girtin was revealed to him the
harbinger of a new epoch in landscape painting, the young Girtin,
friend and fellow-student of Turner, who died in 1802 at the age of
twenty-seven, and of whom Turner said--"Had Girtin lived, I should have
starved."
In 1795 Constable made a tentative visit to London, "for the purpose of
ascertaining what might be his chance of success as a painter." He
carried with him a letter to Joseph Farrington, pupil of Richard
Wilson, who predicted that "his style of landscape would one day form a
distinct feature in the art." Constable also made the acquaintance of
John Thomas Smith, the engraver, known as "Antiquity Smith," who gave
him the following excellent advice, which shows that the revolt against
the academic landscape had already begun in England:
"Do not," said "Antiquity Smith," "set about inventing figures for a
landscape taken from Nature; for you cannot remain an hour in any spot,
however solitary, without the appearance of some living thing that will
in all probability accord better with the scene and time of day than
will any invention of your own."
That visit to London "for the purpose of ascertaining what might be his
chance of success as a painter," would seem to have been encouraging
neither to himself nor to his parents. No immediate answer was
forthcoming, and while the decision was in abeyance his time was
divided between London and Bergholt. It is on record that he worked
hard: that he studied Leonardo's _Treatise on Painting_; that he read
Hessner's _Essay on Landscape_; and that he painted two pictures--"A
Chymist" and "An Alchymist"--of very little merit. Gradually it seems
to have been recognised that he was to become not a painter, but a
clerk in his father's counting-house. In 1797, at the age of
twenty-one, young Constable wrote to "Antiquity Smith":
"I must now take your advice and attend to my father's business ... now
I see plainly it will be my lot to walk through life in a path contrary
to that in which my inclination would lead me." Poor John! Not even a
peep of the skies from the windmill, merely a stool in the
counting-house.
This threat of the counting-house stool seems to have been only a
temporary menace. His biographer dwells very briefly on those dark
disillusioned days. Suddenly the clouds lift, and in 1799 we find him
admitted a student of the Royal Academy Schools. His biographer breaks
the news dramatically, with the statement--"in the year 1799 he had
resumed the pencil, not again to lay it aside." No record is given of
the period he presumably passed in his father's counting-house. We
know only that at twenty-three years of age he attained his heart's
desire. The following passage from a letter written to Dunthorne, on
4th February 1799, inaugurates Constable's career as a painter:
"I am now comfortably settled in Cecil Street, Strand, Number
twenty-three. I shall begin painting as soon as I have the loan of a
sweet little picture by Jacob Ruysdael to copy." No doubt he learned
much from copying Ruysdael and other masters, but Nature was his real
tutor. Later in the year he writes from Ipswich:
"It is a most delightful country for a painter. I fancy I see
Gainsborough in every hedge and hollow tree." And in 1802 he makes
that memorable communication by letter to Dunthorne after a visit to
Sir George Beaumont's pictures, to which reference has already been
made.
"For the last two years I have been running after pictures, and seeking
the truth at second hand ... I shall return to Bergholt, where I shall
endeavour to get a pure and unaffected manner of representing the
scenes that may employ me ... _There is room for a natural painter_.
The great vice of the day is _bravura_, an attempt to do something
beyond the truth."
Constable had now thirty-five years of life before him, through which
he worked unwearyingly, joyfully, to become a natural painter.
Henceforth he was the interpreter of English "cultivated
scenery"--pastures and the skies, trees and cottages, the farm-hand,
the farm-waggon, the farm-horse, the fugitive rain and the wind that
passes. Mountains, the sea, the piled up majestic picturesqueness of
Nature did not attract him. In brain, heart, and vision he was
essential pastoral England, and never did he better express his
innermost feeling than when he wrote:
"I love every stile and stump and lane in the village; as long as I am
able to hold a brush, I shall never cease to paint them."
The life of a painter is not usually exciting, and Constable's life was
no exception, Here are a few dates. In 1802, at the age of
twenty-six, he exhibited his first picture, under the unambitious title
"A Landscape," at the Royal Academy; in 1816, at forty, he married; in
1819, at forty-three, he was elected A.R.A.; in 1824, his "Hay Wain"
was exhibited at the Salon; in 1828 his wife died; in 1829, at
fifty-three, he was elected R.A., and in 1837 he died. The end was
sudden. He had been at work during the day on his last picture of
"Arundel Mill and Castle," and although his friends noticed that he was
not looking well, he was able to go out that evening on an errand
connected with the Artists' Benevolent Fund. He retired to bed about
nine o'clock, read as was his custom, and when the servant removed the
candle by which he had been reading, he was asleep. Later he awoke in
great pain, and died within an hour. The post-mortem revealed no
indications of disease, and the extreme pain, says Leslie, from which
Constable suffered and died could only be traced to indigestion. The
vault in the south-east corner of the churchyard at Hampstead where his
wife had been buried, and from the shock of whose death he never quite
recovered, was opened, and he was laid by her side.
His art was sane and healthy, but his letters show that during the
latter part of his life he suffered from depression and morbid fancies.
"All my indispositions," he wrote to Fisher, "have their source in my
mind. It is when I am restless and unhappy that I become susceptible
of cold, damp, heats, and such nonsense." And, to sum up, Leslie
recalls a passage written by Constable ten years before his death, in
which, after speaking of having removed his family to Hampstead, he
says: "I could gladly exclaim, here let me take my everlasting rest."
But his life was an extremely happy one on the whole; the legacies he
received, placed him in comfortable circumstances, and if, outside his
own fraternity, his art was but little encouraged, that was the lot of
all landscape painters. It is said that he was nearly forty before he
sold a landscape beyond the circle of his relatives and personal
friends. This was probably the "Ploughing Scene in Suffolk," bought
from the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1814 by Mr Allnutt. But to set
against this tardy recognition, there was the splendour of the
acknowledgments that came later--his gold medal at the 1824 Salon, and
the gold medal at Lille in 1825 for his "White Horse." The priced
catalogue of the sale of his pictures and sketches after his death
shows how enormously the appreciation of Constable has increased. The
two magnificent studies for "The Hay Wain" and "The Leaping Horse" now
at the Victoria and Albert Museum, were sold in one lot for fourteen
pounds ten shillings; "Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop's Garden,"
went for sixty-four pounds one shilling, and "The Opening of Waterloo
Bridge" for sixty-three pounds.
Constable fell under the ban of Ruskin--unjustly, "I have never seen
any work of his in which there were signs of his being able to draw" is
the opening of an oft-quoted passage; but when _Modern Painters_ was
being written, as Mr Sturge Henderson points out, the magnificent
collection of Constable's tree studies and sketches, now at South
Kensington, were still in private hands. Ruskin could never have
taunted Constable with not being able to draw had he examined those
studies. Although not a great draughtsman he was certainly a
conscientious, competent, and life-long student of drawing.
Constable has now his assured high place in British art. So valuable
have his paintings become, that he has long been a prey to the forger
and the clever copyist. Mr C. J. Holmes, in his exhaustive and
discriminating work on Constable, devotes four pages to an examination
of the methods of the forgers. In another appendix he prints a
chronological list of Constable's chief pictures and sketches, from
1795, the year of his earliest dated work, "A Study after Claude," to
the "Arundel Mill and Castle," exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1837.
At the beginning of the record of each year's work there is a line
giving the "Places Visited" by Constable during the year. These bare
records are like so many windows opening to the country places which
Constable loved, where he spent joyous, enthusiastic days; for
Constable was never so happy as when he stood with brushes and palette
face to face with Nature. Turner was a world traveller--the world of
Europe. Constable was a home traveller--the homely stiles, stumps, and
lanes of the village. What a vista the following mere record of the
Places Visited in 1823 gives: London, Southgate, Suffolk, Salisbury,
Gillingham, Sherbourne, Fonthill, Cole-Orton. Can you not see him
drawing from each place fresh and dewy inspiration? Not "truth at
second-hand": truth direct from the source. And does not the heart
respond to Constable's generous enthusiasm for his great contemporary.
Here is his testimony to Turner's contributions to the Royal Academy
Exhibition of 1828:
"Turner has some golden visions, glorious and beautiful. They are only
visions, but still, they are art, and one could live and die with such
pictures."
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PLATE VI.--A COUNTRY LANE. National Gallery.
This sketch probably served as the motive for the picture of "The
Cornfield." The sobriety of the work places it in a category between
the careful construction of the Exhibition pictures and the impetuosity
of most of the sketches.
[Illustration: PLATE VI.--A COUNTRY LANE.]
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