HIS SKETCHES
Constable exhibited one hundred and four works at the Royal Academy.
In addition to these and other paintings, he produced many brilliant
sketches and a number of drawings. Like Turner, his achievements may
be exhaustively studied in public Exhibitions in London, and as with
Turner, the difficulty is where to begin. At the National Gallery
there is a wall composed, with one exception, entirely of his works;
the Victoria and Albert Museum contains a room, or rather a hall of his
pictures, sketches, and studies, and he is also represented at the Tate
and Diploma Galleries. Some of the examples were bequeathed to the
nation by his last surviving daughter, Miss Isabel Constable, in 1888.
Two years later Henry Vaughan bequeathed a number of works, including
"The Hay Wain."
The casual visitor finds little emotional excitement, and no literary
interest in these honest interpretations of English scenery. Constable
was never dramatic ("The Opening of Waterloo Bridge" may be counted an
exception) or idealistic like Turner. From a scenic point of view,
"The Hay Wain" is dull compared with "Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus," and
knowledge of art history is not so widely diffused as to give to "The
Hay Wain" the interest it should command as a pioneer picture in modern
landscape. Constable does not thrill. Roast beef does not thrill, but
it is wholesome and life-communicating. Constable was a prosaic man of
genius. Once he said that "painting is another word for feeling," but
he also made that most characteristic retort to Blake, who, when
looking through one of Constable's sketch-books, exclaimed on seeing a
drawing of fir-trees on Hampstead Heath--"Why, this is not drawing, but
inspiration." To which Constable quietly replied--"I meant it for
drawing."
Constable never desired to thrill; his ambition was merely to be a
natural painter, and he would probably not have been in the least
distressed at the episode related by Mr Sturge Henderson in his
biography. An elegant and attractive American woman after examining
"The Glebe Farm" in the National Gallery, remarked to her son, a
typical undergraduate: "Does this thrill you?" "Not the least in the
world," replied the son, and they passed on. No doubt these cultured
moderns desired in a painting the "beauty touched with strangeness,"
that Botticelli and Piero della Francesca offer: there is no place in
such aesthetic lives for the familiarity touched with honesty of John
Constable. To-day his innovations--his attempts to represent the
vibration of light, his spots and splashes of colour to counterfeit the
sun glitter, his touches and scrapings laid on with the palette knife
to obtain force and brightness--have become a commonplace.
Constable, being a pioneer, was accustomed to misunderstanding and also
to badinage. His breezy and showery effects, blowing wind, rustling
grasses, waving trees, and wet rain, were occasionally the subjects of
banter from his fellow Academicians and others. Fuseli, Professor of
Painting, a bad artist, but a good joker, was once seen to open his
umbrella as he entered the Exhibition.
"What are you doing with your umbrella up?" asked a friend.
"Oh," replied Fuseli, "I am going to look at Mr Constable's pictures!"
That was really a great compliment, and I may cap the story by quoting
the brief, bald, criticism of Sir William Beechy on Constable's
"Salisbury from the Meadows."
"Why, d--n it, Constable, what a d----d fine picture you are making;
but you look d----d ill, and you have got a d----d bad cold."
No. Constable of the "unpicturesque localities" does not thrill, and
his pictures evoke a meditative rather than an ecstatic mood. In his
large works one never finds the haunting charm of a fine Corot, the
majesty of a Rousseau, or the clarity of light and colour of a
Harpigny. He did not, except in rare cases, select from the abundance
of Nature; he was content with facts as he saw them, and he laboured at
his surfaces until sometimes one can hardly disentangle the incidents
for the paint in which they are enveloped. "The Leaping Horse," in the
Diploma Gallery, is a magnificent performance in picture-making but it
is heavy--heavy as a mid-day English Sunday dinner. It has force,
strength, knowledge, vigour, but little beauty, except perhaps in the
sweep of sky; and certainly no strangeness. The signs of labour are
written all over it; you feel that he has carefully and conscientiously
composed this picture for an exhibition, and that in the long labour he
has lost the early impulse and freshness of the _pensee mere_. To see
how much he lost you have only to study the large sketch for "The
Leaping Horse," in the Victoria and Albert Museum, finer, bolder, much
more instinct with life and inspiration than the finished production.
Which brings me to the two great divisions of Constable's
life-work--the sketches, which we are told he did not regard as
"serious," and the finished pictures.
His sketches are innumerable, and all, or at any rate the great
majority of them possess the impulse, the lyrical note, so often
lacking in his larger canvases. Of course, this criticism applies to
all painters. The sketch is made for love, the picture for an
Exhibition. What could be more luminously spacious, unworried and
unfettered by the convention of picture-making than his small
oil-sketch of "Harwich: Sea and Lighthouse," in the Tate Gallery, of
which there is a pencil sketch at South Kensington, dated 1815. Here
is the first impression caught and transferred to canvas while the
blood was still hot, the pulse quick, and the eyes eager to record this
scene of desolate beauty, vast sky, rippling ocean, bare foreshore,
lonely lighthouse, and one figure in the foreground, with notes of
almost indistinguishable figures beyond the lighthouse, and a few
remote sails upon the sea. It has not the learning of "The Hay Wain"
or "The Leaping Horse," and the steady flame of Constable's fame would
probably long ago have been extinguished had it depended for existence
entirely upon his sketches; but, speaking for myself, it is to his
sketches that I go for joy. Verily this student of Nature, who
disliked autumn and loved spring; who painted summer, "its breezes, its
heat, its heavy colouring," its gusts of winds, its sudden storms;
verily he lives in our hearts wherever our eyes meet his sketches.
They induce, they compel one to linger in such places as the dark
staircase of the Diploma Gallery, in Burlington House, the walls of
which sing out with two groups of his sketches, significant moments
seen in Nature. That beach and sea; the rain-storm streaming down the
canvas; those floating clouds, only the clouds and the sky visible;
that boat with the red sail labouring in the heavy water--they are
essential Constable. And what an object lesson in the making of a
landscape painter is provided by the hall of drawings, pictures, and
sketches at the Victoria and Albert Museum. They are a standing
refutation of Ruskin's words--"I have never seen any work of his in
which there were signs of his being able to draw, and hence the most
necessary details are painted by him insufficiently." Constable was
not an inspired draughtsman; but that he worked hard at drawing, and
that he achieved considerable mastery with his pencil is abundantly
testified by the many examples at South Kensington, notably, "The Study
of Trees at Hampstead," the "Windsor Castle from the River," the "Cart
and Horses," and above all the magnificent and minute "Stem of an Elm
Tree," none of which, as has already been noted, Ruskin had ever seen.
These are all interesting, almost meticulously conscientious, but for
John Constable in more daring mood, carried away by the riot of the
scene, we must turn to such sketches as the chaotic cloud forms of
"Weymouth Bay," and the splashy, opulent splendour of the oil sketch
called "View on the Stour." Or to the sketches that emerge, modestly
but clamantly, from the large works on the wall devoted to his
achievement at the National Gallery, which contains no fewer than
twenty-two examples by Constable. One of them, "A Country Lane,"
illustrated in these pages, served as a motive for his picture of "The
Cornfield." The sobriety and somewhat heavy handling of this oil
sketch places it in a category between the careful construction of the
Exhibition pictures, and the impetuosity of most of the sketches. But
the atmospheric "Salisbury" that hangs below, to the left of "A Country
Lane," which is a preliminary study without the rainbow for the picture
of "Salisbury from the Meadows," has all the quick, almost feverish
informality of his best sketches. It is larger than the sketches, but
shows no anxiety. The hand following the eye stopped when the vision
of the eye was recorded, when all the hurry of the wet glitter of the
scene had been stated in broken pigment. As a contrast, examine "A
Cornfield with Figures," a tranquilly beautiful suggestion of late
summer--fifteen and a half inches by nine and a half--thinly painted
rain-clouds floating past, the heat haze hovering in the field of corn
partly reaped and stocked. The vivid, "Summer Afternoon after a
Shower," hanging near by has an interest apart from its spontaneity and
vigour. It is precisely what it looks, the recollection of a summer
shower, noted in an ecstatic moment, and recorded at a sitting. The
story is told by Leslie--how Constable was travelling by coach either
to or from Brighton; how at Redhill he saw this effect; how he
treasured the memory of it until the coach reached its destination, and
how "immediately on alighting," he made this sketch of one wild moment
snatched from Nature.
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PLATE VII.--SALISBURY CATHEDRAL FROM THE BISHOP'S GARDEN.
Victoria and Albert Museum.
In the interval between the painting of "The Hay Wain" (1821) and its
exhibition in Paris (1824), Constable produced "Salisbury Cathedral
from the Bishop's Garden," wherein he attempted to represent the
glitter of sunlight by spots of pure pigment, which his friends called
"Constable's snow."
[Illustration: PLATE VII.--SALISBURY CATHEDRAL FROM THE BISHOP'S
GARDEN.]
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It was this constant study of Nature that distinguished Constable from
those of his academic predecessors and contemporaries who studied only
the works of other painters. It was in this solitary communion with
Nature that Constable showed the originality of his genius. How
thorough he was. He was not content to note only what his eyes saw,
but he also observed and recorded the time of day and the direction of
the wind.
"Twenty of Constable's studies of skies made during this season (1822)
are in my possession," says Leslie, "and there is but one among them in
which a vestige of landscape is introduced. They are painted in oil,
on large sheets of thick paper, and all dated, with the time of day,
the direction of the wind, and other memoranda on their backs. On one,
for instance, is written:
'Fifth of September 1822. Ten o'clock morning, looking south-east,
brisk wind at west. Very bright and fresh, grey clouds running fast
over a yellow bed, about half-way in the sky.'"
That is the real Constable speaking, the Constable who had "found
himself." But we are never wholly emancipated from tradition, and
knowing the difficulties of his craft he retained his admiration for
the great ones among his predecessors. In 1824, he wrote: "I looked
into Angerstein's the other day; how paramount is Claude..."
Maybe. But Claude had to be left alone. Constable knew that in his
heart, and, as he advanced in wisdom, art at second-hand held him less
and less, and art at first hand, which is Nature, more and more. He
learnt to rely upon his eyes and the cunning of his hand. And when he
"thanked Heaven he had no imagination," there was more in that
utterance than appears on the surface.