IN CONSTABLE'S COUNTY.
East Bergholt--The Valley of the Stour--Painting from nature--East
Anglian girls.
Charles Kingsley was wont to glorify the teaching of the hills, and to
maintain that the man of the mountain is more imaginative and poetical
than the man of the plain. There are many Scotch people, mostly those
born in the Highlands, who tell us much the same. If the theory be
true--and I am not aware that it is--the exceptions are striking and
many. Lincolnshire is rather a flat country, but it gave us (I can never
bring myself to call him Lord) Alfred Tennyson. Many of our greatest
poets and artists were cockneys; and Constable, that sweet painter of
cornfields and shady lanes and quiet rivers, used to say that the scenes
of his boyhood made him a painter. I was one autumn in Constable's
county, and I do not wonder at it. It is a wonderful district. I trod
all the while, it seemed to me, on enchanted ground: in the gilded mist
of autumn, with its river and its marsh lands, where the cows lazily
fed--or got under the pollards to be out of the way of the flies--where
laughing children swarmed along the hedges in pursuit of the ripe
blackberry, where every cottage front was a thing of beauty, with its ivy
creeping up the roof or over the wall; while the little garden was a mass
of flowers. We expected to see the old gods and goddesses again to
participate in the joyousness of an ancient mirth.
Nor was it altogether a flat land, sacred to fat cattle and wheat and
turnips. All round me were the elements of romance. At one end of the
Vale of Dedham is a hill whence you may look all along the valley
(Constable has made it the subject of one of his pictures) as far as
Harwich; and as I lingered by the Stour--the river which divides Essex
and Suffolk--East Bergholt, clothed with woods and crowned with a church,
in which there is a stained-glass window put up in honour of Constable,
and a baptismal font, the gift of Constable's brother, unfolded to my
wondering eye all her rural charms. There are people who love to climb
hills; I hate to do so. It is all vanity and vexation of spirit; when
you get to the top of one hill the chances are all you see is another
hill, to the top of which you will have to climb. Give me a country
lane, with its luxuriant hedges, its shady trees, its flowers, its
richness of greensward, its pigs and poultry and farmyard; there is
poetry in such nooks and corners of the earth, as Burns and Bloomfield
and Gerald Massey found. No wonder the place made Constable an artist,
and an artist whose name will not speedily pass away. My dear sir or
madam, the next time you are on your way from London to Ipswich, don't
rush along at express speed; get out at Ardleigh, make your way to the
Vale of Dedham, then walk along the Stour, and cross it by a couple of
rustic bridges, and you are at East Bergholt, in Suffolk, where Constable
was born, and if you do so you will bless me evermore. Then, if you
like, rejoin the train at Manningtree, and resume your journey. Few East
Anglians even are aware of the wealth of beauty in that quiet corner.
'The beauty of the surrounding scenery,' writes Constable's biographer,
'its gentle declivities, its luxuriant meadows, flats sprinkled with
flocks and herds, its well-cultivated Uplands, its woods and rivers, with
mansions scattered, and churches, farms, and picturesque cottages--all
impart to this spot an amenity and elegance hardly anywhere else to be
found.'
The Constables have been long in the district. The grandfather was a
farmer at a village close by. The father, who was well-to-do, purchased
a water-mill at Dedham and two windmills at East Bergholt, where he
lived. The great artist, his son John, was born in the last century, and
was educated at Lavenham and the Dedham Grammar School, and when the lad
had reached sixteen or seventeen became addicted to painting, his studio
being in the house of a Mr. John Dunthorne, a painter and glazier, with
whom he remained on terms of the greatest intimacy for many years. The
father would fain have made the son a farmer. He preferred to be a
miller, and in his young days was known in the district as the handsome
miller. His windmills, when he took to painting, were wonderful, and
well deserved the criticism of his brother, who used to say, 'When I look
at a windmill painted by John, I see that it will go round, which is not
always the case with those of other artists,' for the simple reason that
John knew what he was about, which the others did not. Again, his
industrial career helped him in another way. A miller learns to study
the clouds, and Constable's clouds were exceptionally life-like and real.
The handsome young miller soon acquired artistic friends, one of them
being Sir George Beaumont, the guide, philosopher, and friend of most of
the geniuses of that time. Said another to him, 'Do not trouble yourself
about inventing figures for a landscape; you cannot remain an hour in a
spot without the appearance of some living thing, that will in all
probability better accord with the scene and the time of day than any
invention of your own.' After a visit to his artist friends in London,
he resumed his mill life, and in 1779 he finally commenced his artistic
career, and painted all the country round. His studies were chiefly
Dedham, East Bergholt, the Valley of the Stour, and the neighbouring
village of Stratford. At Stoke Nayland he painted an altar-piece for the
church. There is also another altar-piece in a neighbouring church, but
his altar-pieces are not known or treasured like his other works.
Cooper tells a good story of Constable. One day Stodart, the sculptor,
met Fuseli starting forth with an old umbrella. 'Why do you carry the
umbrella?' asked the sculptor. 'I am going to see Constable,' was the
reply, 'and he is always painting rain.' One can only remark that, if
Constable was always painting rain, he always did it well.
Another good story was told Redgrave by Lee. 'I hear you sell all your
pictures,' said Constable to the younger landscape-painter. 'Why, yes,'
said Lee; 'I'm pretty fortunate. Don't you sell yours?' 'No,' said
Constable, 'I don't sell any of my pictures, and I'll tell you why: when
I paint a _bad_ picture I don't like to part with it, and when I paint a
_good_ one I like to keep it.' It is well known that one year when
Constable was on the Council of the Royal Academy, one of his own
pictures was passed by mistake before the judges. 'Cross it,' said one.
'It won't do,' said another. 'Pass on,' said a third. And the carpenter
was just about to chalk it with a cross, when he read the name of 'John
Constable.' Of course there were lame apologies, and the picture was
taken from the condemned heap and placed with the works of his brother
Academicians. But after work was over Constable took the picture under
his arm, and, despite the remonstrance of his brother colleagues, marched
off with it, saving: 'I can't think of its being hung after it has been
fairly turned out. The work so condemned was the 'Stream bordered in
with Willows,' now in the South Kensington Museum. Leslie once remarked
to Redgrave that he would give any work he had painted for it, so warmly
did he admire it.
'Constable is the best landscape-painter we have,' wrote Frith to his
mother in 1835. 'He is a very merry fellow, and very rich. He told us
an anecdote of a man who came to look at his pictures; he was a gardener.
One day he called him into his painting-room to look at his pictures,
when the man made the usual vulgar remarks, such as, "Did you do all
this, sir?" "Yes." "What, all this?" "Yes." "What, frame and all?"
At last he came to an empty frame that was hung against the wall without
any picture in it, when he said to Constable, "But you don't call this
picture quite finished, do you, sir?" Constable said that quite sickened
him, and he never let any ignoramuses ever see his pictures again, or
frames either.'
Constable's great merits, writes Mr. Frith, were first recognised in
France, with the result upon French landscape art that is felt at the
present time. His advice to Frith was: 'Never do anything without nature
before you if it be possible to have it. See those weeds and the dock
leaves? They are to come into the foreground of this picture. I know
dock leaves pretty well, but I should not attempt to introduce them into
a picture without having them before me.'
Constable died very suddenly in 1837. His fame, now that he is dead, is
greater than when he was alive. His work abides in all its strength.
There is little in East Bergholt to remind one of Constable, where his
reputation remains as that of a genial and kindly-hearted man; but the
landscape in all its essential features remains the same. The house in
which he was born was pulled down in 1841, which is a great pity, as it
is described as a large and handsome mansion. But I never saw a small
village with so many attractive residences, though why anybody should
live in any of them I could not, for the life of me, understand. Yet
there they were, quite a street of them, all in beautiful order, as if
they were the residences of wealthy citizens in the suburbs of a busy
town. They ought to have been filled with handsome girls, as Charles
Kingsley tells us East Anglia is famed for the beauty of its women; all I
can say, however, is that I saw none of them, or any sign of life
anywhere, beyond the inevitable tradesmen's carts. Independently of
Constable, East Bergholt claims to be worth a pilgrimage for its rustic
beauty, which, however, becomes tame and common as you get away from it.
The church is old, and has a history--of little consequence, however, to
anyone now. One of its rectors was burned at Ipswich in Queen Mary's
reign. His name, Samuel, ought to be preserved by a Church which, till
lately, had few martyrs of its own. East Bergholt has also a
Congregational and Primitive Methodist chapel, and a colony of
Benedictine nuns, driven away from France by the great Revolution. We
are a hospitable people, and we are proud to be so, but have we not just
at this time too many refugee nuns and monks in our midst?