HIS PICTURES
In one of his letters, dated 1799, Constable refers to "a sweet little
picture by Jacob Ruysdael I am copying." He was then twenty-three
years of age, a devoted admirer and student of his predecessors in
landscape, and able, strange as it may seem to us, to call a Ruysdael
sweet. In the style of the old masters he continued working until he
was nearly forty, learning from them how to construct a picture, and
"acquiring execution" as he expressed it. A methodical man was John
Constable, a builder who spared no trouble to make his foundations
sound; but during those years of spade work in his voluntary
apprenticeship, he never disregarded his determination to become a
natural painter. It was his custom to study and copy the old masters
during his sojourn in London, but to paint in his own original way,
directly from Nature and in the open air, when in the country. An
early result of "being himself" during holiday time was the "Dedham
Vale" oil sketch of 1802, now at South Kensington, a careful, reposeful
picture with trees rising formally at the right, and the church tower
visible just beyond the winding river. He utilised this sketch for the
large picture exhibited, under the same title, in 1828. The influence
of other painters such as the Dutch landscape men, Gainsborough and
Girtin, may be traced in many of his pictures produced in the opening
years of the nineteenth century when he was "acquiring the execution"
on which he based his originality. He also painted portraits; indeed
at one time he proposed to live by portrait painting. During 1807 and
the next few years he produced several, notably Mr Charles Lloyd of
Birmingham and his wife, which Mr C. J. Holmes describes as "amateurish
and uncertain in drawing and execution." But there was nothing
amateurish or uncertain about the "Portrait of a Boy," which I have
lately seen, a ruddy country boy, clad in pretty town-like clothes, an
honest, direct, rich piece of work, without a hint of affectation, just
the vision of the eye set down straightforwardly. And the foxgloves
that stand growing by the boy's right hand are painted as honestly as
the striped pantaloons that this open-air boy wears. Just the kind of
portrait that John Constable would have painted. He also produced two
altarpieces--in 1804, a "Christ Blessing Little Children" at Brantham
Church, Suffolk; and in 1809, a "Christ Blessing the Elements" at
Nayland Church.
Eight years later, in 1817, he painted "Flatford Mill on the Stour,"
No. 1273 in the National Gallery, which forms one of our illustrations.
Constable was then forty-one, a somewhat mature age for a man to
produce what may fairly be called his first important picture. But all
his past life had been a preparation for this photographic, pleasant
transcript of English scenery. Nothing is left to the imagination,
everything is stated, every inch of canvas is painted with equal force,
yet what an advance it is upon most of the classical landscapes then in
vogue. 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.
This picture was bought in at the Constable sale, held the year after
his death, in 1838, for the very modest sum of thirty-three guineas.
"The White Horse," called also "A Scene on the River Stour," exhibited
at the Royal Academy in 1819, which is now in the possession of Mr
Pierpont Morgan, was one of Constable's early successes. It attracted
"more attention than anything he had before exhibited," and was bought
for one hundred guineas, "exclusive of the frame," by Archdeacon
Fisher, who wrote on 27th April:--"'The White Horse' has arrived; it is
hung on a level with the eye, the frame resting on the ogee moulding in
a western side light, right for the light in the picture. It looks
magnificently." "The White Horse" realised one hundred and fifty
guineas at the Constable sale, and in 1894, fifty-six years later, was
bought by Messrs Agnew for six thousand two hundred guineas.
With "The White Horse" Constable also sent to the British Gallery a
picture called "The Mill," which is supposed to be identical with the
"Dedham Mill, Essex," at the Victoria and Albert Museum. 1819 was a
successful year for Constable, a golden year. He was summoned to
Bergholt to receive the four thousand pounds he had inherited from his
father; in this year Mrs Constable also inherited four thousand pounds;
and he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy. It was in this
year while at Bergholt that he wrote to his wife from a grateful and
overflowing heart a letter of which the following is an
extract:--"Everything seems full of blossom of some kind, and at every
step I take, and on whatever subject I turn my eyes, that sublime
expression of the Scriptures, 'I am the resurrection and the life,'
seems as if uttered near me." There spoke the true landscape painter,
the man of deep feeling, conscious that in his painting he was
interpreting God's handiwork, and expressing in his chosen medium the
miracle of growth, the eternal movement of Nature from birth to
re-birth. When standing in that hall at the Victoria and Albert Museum
devoted to his achievement--growth, growth, growth--from pencil sketch
to completed picture, there are moments when those words of his seem
uttered near to us.
"Dedham Mill" may look to our spoilt modern eyes a little tame, but
detach yourself from the present, drift into harmony with the picture,
and you may perhaps invoke the spirit of the dead man who saw temperate
beauty in this scene of his boyhood, and who tried to state his love
and gratitude laboriously with paint and brushes--poor tools to express
the living light and life of Nature.
Two years later, in 1821, at the age of forty-five, he painted "The Hay
Wain," to which I have referred at length in the opening chapter.
Perhaps some day when the re-organisation of the National Collections
is complete, it will be found possible to hang the brilliant full-sized
sketch of "The Hay Wain" now at South Kensington alongside the finished
picture in the National Gallery. In the rough magnificent sketch you
will observe that he had already begun to use the palette-knife freely
in putting on the colour, a practice to which he became more and more
addicted.
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PLATE VIII.--SALISBURY.
National Gallery.
A preliminary study, without the rainbow, for the large picture of
"Salisbury from the Meadows," exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1831.
It is larger than his usual 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.
[Illustration: PLATE VIII.--SALISBURY.]
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"The Hay Wain" established his fame; but Constable was not the man to
sit down under success and repeat his triumphs in one particular
method. In the interval between the painting of "The Hay Wain" and its
exhibition in Paris, he produced "Salisbury from the Bishop's Garden,"
now in the South Kensington collection, wherein he attempted to
represent the glitter of sunlight by spots of pure pigment which his
friends called "Constable's snow." To us, accustomed to modern
pictures of sunlight, the "spots and scumbles of pure pigment" in
"Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop's Garden" are hardly noticeable,
but in 1823 they were an innovation, although not altogether a new
discovery. Pinturicchio, in his frescoes in the library of Siena
Cathedral, experimented in pointillism, and you may trace it, too, in
some of the pictures by Vermeer of Delft. "Salisbury from the Bishop's
Garden" gave Constable considerable trouble. He was ill and his
children were ill. "What with anxiety, watching, nursing, and my own
indisposition, I have not see the face of my easel since Christmas, and
it is not the least of my troubles that the good Bishop's picture is
not yet fit to be seen." Later he describes "Salisbury from the
Bishop's Garden" as "the most difficult subject in landscape I ever had
upon my easel," adding that it "looks uncommonly well," and that "I
have not flinched at the windows, buttresses, etc., but I have still
kept to my grand organ colour, and have, as usual, made my escape in
the evanescence of the Chiaroscuro."
"The Lock," another of his well-known pictures, was purchased from the
Royal Academy Exhibition of 1824 by Mr Morrison for "one hundred and
fifty guineas, including the frame." The superb oil sketch for "The
Lock" was sold at Christie's in 1901 for nineteen hundred guineas. It
is an upright picture of sunshine and gusty wind, and represents a
lock-keeper opening the gates for the passage of a boat. "My 'Lock'"
wrote Constable to Fisher, "is liked at the Academy, and indeed it
forms a decided feature, and its light cannot be put out, because it is
the light of Nature, the mother of all that is valuable in poetry,
painting, or anything else where an appeal to the soul is required....
But my execution annoys most of them, and all the scholastic ones.
Perhaps the sacrifices I make for lightness and brightness are too
great, but these things are the essence of landscape, and my extreme is
better than white-lead and oil, and dado painting." Probably no other
landscape painter has expressed the intention of his art as clearly in
writing as with his brushes. Light! The light of Nature! The mother
of all that is valuable in painting! That was Constable's secret--the
knowledge of light, a secret that was hidden from the eyes of worthy
Sir George Beaumont.
"The Leaping Horse" of 1825, to which reference has already been made,
called by some his "grandest painting," reposes in the Diploma Gallery
at Burlington House. Several changes were made in the picture after
its exhibition at the Royal Academy, which the curious can verify by a
study of the full-sized sketch at South Kensington. From this year
onward the movement of Nature and the brilliancy of objects in sunlight
intrigued him more and more, although his passion for light never
reached the white-hot fervour of Turner in his latter years. For
Turner the sunrise, a world almost too beautiful and evanescent to be
real; for Constable the noonday glow, the still heat haze, seen between
cool, dark trees, hovering over a field of ripe corn, as in "The
Cornfield," painted when he was fifty--a typical Constable. Constable
was pleased with "The Cornfield." Writing of it to 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
'While now a fresher gale
Sweeping with shadowy gusts the fields of corn....'"
This picture, perhaps the best known and most popular of his works, was
presented to the National Gallery in 1837, by an association of
gentlemen, who purchased it of the painter's executors. Some of them
wished to substitute for this gift the fine "Salisbury Cathedral from
the Meadows" with the rainbow, of which the "Salisbury," No. 1814, in
the National Gallery, is a study, but "the boldness of its execution"
we are told "stood in its way," and the "Cornfield" was purchased
instead. The association of gentlemen need not have been apprehensive
that the "boldness of the execution" of "Salisbury from the Meadows"
would have frightened succeeding generations. The Munich Secessionists
would call it commonplace, and the most old-fashioned member of the
selecting committee of a current Royal Academy Exhibition would see in
it only a fine picture, forcibly painted but too insistent on detail.
The landscape point of view has changed since 1837.
The magnificent "Opening of Waterloo Bridge" which, to those who had
not seen it in Sir Charles Tennant's collection, came as a revelation
when shown at the Old Masters' Exhibition, gave Constable continuous
trouble and anxiety. He was years over it, and "he indulged in the
vagaries of the palette-knife to an excess." It was not understood: it
was not liked. "Very unfinished, sir," was the comment of his friend,
Thomas Stothard, R.A.; and, says Leslie, "the picture was generally
pronounced a failure." This brilliant presentation of the King
embarking at Whitehall stairs, the water dancing, the air fluttering
with gay banners and the sails of bright and sumptuous barges, was hung
next to a grey sea-piece by Turner, who promptly placed a bright spot
of red lead in the foreground of his own grey picture. The vivacity of
Constable's river fete lost something by that spot of vivid red.
"Turner has been here and fired a gun," said Constable. The flash
remained, although "in the last moments allowed for painting, Turner
glazed the scarlet seal he had put upon his picture, and shaped it into
a buoy." Considerable doubt has been thrown on Leslie's statement
"that soon after Constable's death the picture was toned to the
aristocratic taste of the period by a coat of blacking." The picture
bears no trace of a coat of mourning.
In the somewhat solemn and simple "Valley Farm," painted in 1835, two
years before his death, Constable returned to the scenes of his
boyhood, to Willy Lett's house on the bank of the Stour. His hand and
eye have lost something of their grip and freshness, but his purpose is
as firm as ever. "I have preserved God Almighty's daylight," he wrote,
"which is enjoyed by all mankind, excepting only the lovers of old
dirty canvas, perished pictures at a thousand guineas each, cart
grease, tar, and snuff of candle." The old Adam, you perceive, was
still strong in him.
"The Cenotaph," now in the National Gallery, was exhibited in the Royal
Academy of 1836--the subject being the cenotaph erected by Sir George
Beaumont in memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds, a tribute of affection and
respect. It is somewhat heavy in treatment. Did Constable, I wonder,
realise that his work was nearly done? Was the uninspiriting
"Cenotaph" in his mind when, in the autumn of this year, he wrote so
generously about the pictures that his great contemporary was
exhibiting:--"Turner has outdone himself; he seems to paint with tinted
steam, so evanescent and so airy."
Constable's last work was "Arundel Mill and Castle," upon which he was
engaged on the day of his death, 31st March 1837.
His pictures are familiar to many who have not seen all the originals,
through David Lucas's mezzotints. The first series of twenty
mezzotints was published in 1833 under the title, "Various Subjects of
Landscape, characteristic of English Scenery, principally intended to
display the Phenomena of the Chiar'oscuro of Nature." Constable
devoted much attention to the enterprise during the remainder of his
life, inspired to make it as fine as possible by the example of
Claude's "Liber Veritatis" and Turner's "Liber Studiorum." But its
"duration, its expense, its hopelessness of remuneration" oppressed
him. "It harasses my days and disturbs my rest at nights" he wrote in
1831. Constable took things hardly, very hardly, after his wife's
death in 1828.