vacation from the work set him by his father, and for two years he
painted "cottages, studied anatomy," and did the drudgery of his art;
but there was little money in it for him, and soon he had to go into
his father's counting house, for windmills seemed to have paid the
elder Constable, considerably better than painting promised to pay
young John.
John doubtless liked counting-house work even less than he had done
the study of windmills and weather in his father's fields. He was a
most persistent fellow, however, and finally he returned to London, to
study again the art he loved, this time in the Royal Academy, which
meant that he had made some progress.
His father gave him very little aid to do the things he longed to do,
but after his father's death he found that a little money was coming
to him from the estate--£4,000. He had already triumphed over his
difficulties by painting his first fine pictures; he now knew that he
was to become a successful artist, and be able to take care of himself
and a wife. Though in love, he had hitherto been too poor to
marry. His first splendid work was "Dedham Vale."
Though things were going very well with him, it was not until Paris
discovered him that he achieved great success. In 1824 he painted two
large pictures which he took to Paris, and there he found fame. The
best landscape painting in France dates from the time when Constable's
works were hung in the Louvre, to become the delight of all
art-lovers.
He received a gold medal from Charles X., and became more honoured
abroad than he had ever been at home.
Constable had many enemies, and made many more after he became an
Academician. Some artists, who would have liked that honour and who
could not gain it for themselves, declared that Constable painted
"with a palette knife," though it certainly would not have mattered if
he had, since he made great pictures.
He painted things exactly as he saw them, and was not a popular
artist. Most of all, he loved to paint the scenes that he had known so
well in his youth, and he did them over and over again, as if the
subject was one in which he wished to reach perfection.
When he died he left a picture, "Arundel Castle and Mill," standing
with its paint wet upon his easel for he passed away very suddenly, on
April 1st, leaving behind him many unsold paintings.
He was a sensitive chap, and throughout his youth was greatly
distressed by the differences of opinion between himself and his
father. He was torn asunder between a sense of duty and his own wish
to be an artist; and his greatest consolation in this situation was in
the friendship he had formed for a plumber, who, like himself, dearly
loved art. The plumber's name was John Dunthorne, and the two men
wandered about the country, when not employed at their regular work,
and together, by streams and in fields, painted the same scenes. At
one time they hired a little room in the neighbouring village which
they made into a studio. Constable was a handsome fellow in his youth
and was known to all as the "handsome miller." His father, the yeoman
farmer with the windmills, was also a miller.
In London he became acquainted with one John Smith, known as
"Antiquity Smith," who taught him something of etching. After he was
recalled to his father's business, his mother wrote to "Antiquity
Smith," that she hoped John "would now attend to business, by which he
will please me and his father, and ensure his own respectability and
comfort"--a complete expression of the middle-class British mind. Her
satisfaction was short-lived, for her son soon returned to London.
When his first pictures were rejected by the Royal Academy he showed
one of them to Sir Benjamin West, who said hopefully: "Don't be
disheartened, young man, we shall hear of you again; you must have
loved nature very much before you could have painted this."
About that time he tried to paint many kinds of pictures, such as
portraits and sacred subjects, but he did not seem to succeed in
anything except the scenes of his boyhood, which he truly loved. Hence
he gave up attempting that which he could do only passably, and kept
to what he could do supremely well.
When his friends wished him to continue portrait painting, the only
thing that was well paid at that time, Constable wrote: "You know I
have always succeeded best with my native scenes. They have always
charmed me, and I hope they always will. I have now a path marked out
very distinctly for myself, and I am desirous of pursuing it
uninterruptedly."
About the time he fell in love and before his father's death, his
health began to fail, and the young woman's mother would have none of
him. Her father was in favour of Constable, but he could not hold out
against the chance of his daughter losing her grandfather's fortune by
marrying the wrong man.
The lady was not so distractingly in love as young Constable was, and
she did not entirely like the idea of poverty, even with John, so she
held off, and with so much anxiety Constable became downright ill. For
five years the pair lived apart, and then the artist and the young
woman, whose name was Maria Bicknell, lost their mothers about the
same time, This drew them very closely together; and to help the
matter on, John's attendance upon his father in his last illness
brought him to the same town as Miss Bicknell. After his father's
death, he urged the young lady so strongly to be his wife that she
consented They were married and her father soon forgave her, but not
so her grandfather, who declared that he never would forgive her, but
he really must have done so from the first, for when he died it was
found that he had left her a little fortune of £4,000. This was about
the same amount the artist had received from his father, so that they
were able to get on very well.
After Constable's marriage he went on a visit to Sir George Beaumont,
and there an amusing incident occurred which is known to-day as the
story of Sir George's "brown tree." It seems that Constable's ideas of
colour for his landscapes were so true to nature that a good many
people did not approve of them, and one day while painting, Sir George
declared that the colour of an old Cremona fiddle was the best model
of colour tone that a landscape could have. Constable's only answer
was to place the fiddle on the green lawn in front of the house. At
another time his host asked the artist, "Do you not find it very
difficult to determine where to place your brown tree?" "Not at all,"
was Constable's reply, "for I never put such a thing into a picture in
my life."
In painting one picture many times he declared, "Its light cannot be
put out because it is the light of nature." A Frenchman called
attention to one of his pictures thus: "Look at these landscapes by an
Englishman. The ground appears to be covered with dew."
Notwithstanding the little fortune of his wife and himself, Constable
was not quite carefree, because he had to raise a good sized family of
six children so that when his wife's father died and left his daughter
£20,000 he said to a friend: "Now I shall stand before a six-foot
canvas with a mind at ease, thank God!" In the very midst of this
happiness, his beloved wife became ill with consumption, and was
certain to die. He no longer cared very much for life and wrote very
sadly:
"I have been ill, but am endeavouring to get work again, and could I
get afloat upon a canvas of six feet, I might have a chance of being
carried from myself." When he became a member of the Royal Academy, he
said: "It has been delayed until I am solitary and cannot impart it,"
meaning that without his dear wife to share his good fortune, it
seemed an empty honour to him.
Strange things are told which show how little his work was valued by
his countrymen. After he had become a member of the Academy one of his
small pictures was entered but rejected; nobody knowing anything about
it. It was put on one side among the "outsiders." Finally, one of his
fellow members glancing at it was attracted.
"Stop a bit! I rather like that. Why not say 'doubtful'?" Later
Constable acknowledged the picture as his, and then they wished to
hang it, but he refused to let them. Another Academy story is about
his picture "Hadleigh Castle." On Varnishing Day, Chartney, a
brilliant critic, told Constable that the foreground of the picture
was "too cold," and so he undertook to "warm it," by giving it a
strong glaze with asphaltum with Constable's brush which he snatched
from the artist's hand. Constable gazed at him in horror. "Oh! there
goes all my dew," he cried, and when Chartney's back was turned he
hurriedly wiped the "warmth" all away and got back his "dew."
Even the amusing things that happened to him, seem to have a little
sadness about them. He wrote to a friend: "Beechey was here yesterday,
and said: 'Why d--n it Constable, what a d--n fine picture you are
making; but you look d--n ill, and you've got a d--n bad cold!' so,"
added Constable, "you have evidence on oath of my being about a fine
picture and that I am looking ill."
An illustration of his painstaking and truthfulness to nature is that
he once took home with him from a visit bottles of coloured sand and
fragments of stone which he meant to introduce into a picture; and on
passing some slimy posts near a mill, he said to his host, "I wish you
could cut those off and send their tops to me."
Constable was a loyal friend, the most persistent of men, and several
anecdotes are told of his characteristics. His friend Fisher said to
him:
"Where real business is to be done, you are the most energetic and
punctual of men. In smaller matters, such as putting on your breeches,
you are apt to lose time in deciding which leg shall go in first."
PLATE--THE HAY WAIN
This picture was first called "Landscape," and it was painted in
1821. In his letters about it, however, Constable also called it
"Noon," and others wrote of it as "Midsummer Noon." This tells us what
a wealth of hot sunlight is suggested by the painting.
It shows a little farmhouse upon the bank of a stream, a spot well
known as "Willy Lott's Cottage." The owner had been born there and he
died there eighty-eight years later, without ever having left his
cottage for four whole days in all those years. Upon the tombstone of
Lott, which is in the Bergholt burial ground, his epitaph calls the
house "Gibeon Farm." It was a favourite scene with Constable, and he
painted it many times from every side. It is the same house we see in
the "Mill Stream," another Constable painting, and again in "Valley
Farm." In this last picture he painted the side opposite to the one
shown in the "Hay Wain."
The stream near which the house stands spreads out into a ford, and in
the picture the hay cart, with two men upon it, is passing through the
ford. The horses are decked out with red tassels. On the right of the
stream there is a broad meadow, golden green in the sunlight, "with
groups of trees casting cool shadows on the grass, and backed by a
distant belt of woodland of rich blues and greens." On the right is a
fisherman, half hidden by a bush, standing near his punt.
Constable wrote to his friend, Fisher, "My picture goes to the Academy
on the tenth." This was written on April 1st, 1821. "It is not so
grand as Tinney's." This shows us, that Constable had not vanity
enough to interfere with his self-criticism. Again in a letter written
to him by a friend: "How does the 'Hay Wain' look now it has got into
your own room again?" adding that he wished to see it there, away from
the Academy which to him was always "like a great pot of boiling
varnish."
Later Fisher wrote: "I have a great desire to possess your 'Wain,' but
I cannot now reach what it is worth;" and he begged Constable not to
sell it without giving him a chance to try once more to raise the
money to buy it. He wrote that the picture would become of greater
value to his children if the artist left it hanging upon the walls of
the Academy, "till you join the society of Ruysdael, Wilson, and
Claude. As praise and money will then be of no value to you, the world
will liberally bestow both."
Later a Frenchman wished to buy it for exhibition purposes, and when
Constable wrote to Fisher of this, his friend replied that he had
better sell it to the Frenchman "for the sake of the _éclat_ it may
give you. The stupid English public, which has no judgment of its own,
will begin to think there is something in it if the French make your
works national property. You have long lain under a mistake; men do
not purchase pictures because they admire them, but because others
covet them."
Finally, the "Hay Wain" was sold to the French dealer for £250, and
Constable threw in a picture of Yarmouth for good measure. Later a
friend declared that he had created a good deal of argument about
landscape painting, and that there had come to be two divisions, for
he had practically founded a new school. He received a gold medal for
the "Hay Wain," and the French nation tried to buy it. In the Louvre
are "The Cottage," "Weymouth Bay," and "The Glebe Farm." Elsewhere are
"Hampstead Heath," "Salisbury Cathedral," "The Lock on the Stour,"
"Dedham Mill," "The Valley Farm," "Gillingham Mill," "The Cornfield,"
"Boat-Building," "Flatford Mill on the River Stour," besides many
others.
IX
JOHN SINGLETON COPLEY
_English School_
1737-1815
A little boy with a squirrel was the first picture that pointed this
artist toward fame and that was painted in England and exhibited at
the Society of Arts.
This American-born Irishman had no family or ancestry of account, but
he himself was to become the father of Lord Chancellor Lyndhurst, and
he did some truly fine things in art.
About the same time America had another painter, Benjamin West, marked
out for fame, but he got his start in Europe while Copley had already
become a successful artist before he left Boston, his native place.
He liked best to paint "interiors"--rooms with fine furniture and
curtains, women in fine clothing and men in embroidered waistcoats and
bejewelled buckles.
In 1777 he got into the Royal Academy, and on the whole had
considerable influence on European art. If we study the portraits that
he painted while in Boston, we can get a very complete idea of the
surroundings of the "Royalists" at the time of our colonial history.
PLATE--THE COPLEY FAMILY GROUP
In this picture there are seven figures with an open landscape forming
the background. The baby of the family plays, with uplifted arms, upon
grandfather's knee. The mother on the couch, surrounded by her three
other children, is kissing one while another clings to her. Before her
stands a prim little maid, gowned in the fashion of grown-folks of her
day. A little lock of hair falling upon her forehead suggests that
when she was good she was very, very good, and when she was bad she
was horrid! She wears a little cap. At the back is the artist himself
in a wig and other fashions of the time. A great column rises behind
him, forming a part of the architecture or the landscape, one hardly
knows which in so artificially constructed a picture.
Copley painted also John Hancock, Judge Graham, Jeremiah Lee, and
General Joseph Warren.
X
JEAN BAPTISTE CAMILLE COROT
(Pronounced Zhahn Bah-teest' Cah-mee'yel Coh'roh)
_Fontainebleau-Barbizon School_
1796-1875
_Pupil of Michallon_
About three hundred years before Corot's time there was a
Fontainebleau school of artists, made up of the pathetic Andrea del
Sarto, the wonderful Leonardo da Vinci, and Cellini. These painters
had been summoned from their Italian homes by Francis I., to decorate
the Palace of Fontainebleau. The second great group of painters who
had studios in the forest and beside the stream were Rousseau, Dupré,
Diaz, and Daubigny; Troyon, Van Marcke, Jacque; then Millet, the
painter of peasants.
Corot was born in Paris and received what education the ordinary
school at Rouen could give him. He was intended by his parents for
something besides art, as it would seem that every artist in the world
was intended. Corot was to grow up and become a respectable draper; at
any rate a draper.
The young chap did as his father wished, until he was twenty-six years
old, and dreary years those must have been to him. He did not get on
well with his master, nor did the world treat him very well. He found
neither riches nor the fame that was his due till he was an old man of
seventy. At that age he had become as rich a man as he might have been
had he remained a sensible draper.
Best of all, Corot loved to paint clouds and dewy nights, pale moons
and early day, and of all amusements in the world, he preferred the
theatre. There he would sit; gay or sad as the play might make him,
weeping or laughing and as interested as a little child.
After he had anything to give away, Corot was the most madly generous
of men. It was he who gave a pension to the widow of his brother
artist, Millet, on which she lived all the rest of her days. He gave
money to his brother painters and to all who went to him for aid; and
he always gave gaily, freely, as if giving were the greatest joy,
outside of the theatre, a man could have. Everyone who knew him loved
him, and there was no note of sadness in his daily life, though there
seems to be one in his poetical pictures. Because of his generous ways
he was known as "Pere Corot." He sang as he worked, and loved his
fellowmen all the time; but most of all, he loved his sister.
"Rousseau is an eagle," he used to say in speaking of his fellow
artist. "As for me, I am only a lark, putting forth some little songs
in my gray clouds."
It has been noted that most great landscape painters have been
city-bred, a remarkable fact. Constable and Gainsborough were born and
bred in the country, but they are exceptions to the rule. Corot's
parents were Parisians of the purest dye, having been court-dressmakers
to Napoleon I.; and when Corot finally determined to leave the
draper's shop and become a painter, his father said: "You shall
have a yearly allowance of 1,200 francs, and if you can live on that,
you can do as you please." When his son was made a member of the
Legion of Honour, after twenty-three years of earnest work, his father
thought the matter over, and presently doubled the allowance, "for
Camille seems to have some talent after all," he remarked as an excuse
for his generosity.
It is told that when he first went to study in Italy, Corot longed to
transfer the moving scenes before him to canvas; but people moved too
quickly for him, so he methodically set about learning how to do with
a few strokes what he would otherwise have laboured over. So he
reduced his sketching to such a science that he became able to sketch
a ballet in full movement; and it is remarked that this practice
trained him for presenting the tremulousness of leaves of trees, which
he did so exquisitely.
One learns something of this painter of early dawn and soft evening
from a letter he wrote to his friend Dupré:
One gets up at three in the morning, before the sun; one goes and sits
at the foot of a tree; one watches and waits. One sees nothing much at
first. Nature resembles a whitish canvas on which are sketched
scarcely the profiles of some masses; everything is perfumed, and
shines in the fresh breath of dawn. Bing! the sun grows bright but has
not yet torn aside the veil behind which lie concealed the meadows,
the dale, and hills of the horizon. The vapours of night still creep,
like silvery flakes over the numbed-green vegetation. Bing! bing!--a
first ray of sunlight--a second ray of sunlight--the little flowers
seem to wake up joyously. They all have their drop of dew which
trembles--the chilly leaves are stirred with the breath of morning--in
the foliage the birds sing unseen--all the flowers seem to be saying
their prayers. Loves on butterfly wings frolic over the meadows and
make the tall plants wave--one sees nothing--yet everything is
there--the landscape is entirely behind the veil of mist, which
mounts, mounts, sucked up by the sun; and as it rises, reveals the
river, plated with silver, the meadow, the trees, cottages, the
receding distance--one distinguishes at last everything that one had
divined at first.
In all the world there can hardly be a more exquisite story of
daybreak than this; and so beautiful was the mood into which Corot
fell at eventime, as he himself describes it, that it would be a
mistake to leave it out. This is his story of the night:
Nature drowses--the fresh air, however, sighs among the leaves--the
dew decks the velvety grass with pearls. The nymphs fly--hide
themselves--and desire to be seen. Bing! a star in the sky which
pricks its image on the pool. Charming star--whose brilliance is
increased by the quivering of the water, thou watchest me--thou
smilest to me with half-closed eye! Bing!--a second star appears in
the water, a second eye opens. Be the harbingers of welcome, fresh and
charming stars. Bing! Bing! Bing!--three, six, twenty stars. All the
stars in the sky are keeping tryst in this happy pool. Everything
darkens, the pool alone sparkles. There is a swarm of stars--all
yields to illusion. The sun being gone to bed, the inner sun of the
soul, the sun of art awakens. Bon! there is my picture done!
In writing those letters, Corot made literature as well as
pictures. That little word "bing!" appears also in his paintings, as
little leaves or bits of tree-trunk, some small detail which,
high-lightened, accents the whole.
PLATE--DANCE OF THE NYMPHS
There could hardly be a more charming painting than this which hangs
in the Louvre. It is of a half-shut-in landscape of tall trees, their
branches mingling; and all the atmospheric effects that belong to
Corot's work can here be seen.
On the open greensward is a group of nymphs dancing gaily, while over
all the scene is the veil of fairy-land or of something quite
mysterious. At the back and side, satyrs can be seen watching the
nymphs. There is here less of the blur of leaves than that seen in
later pictures, but the same soft effect is found, and the little
"bings" are the accents of light placed upon a leaf, a nymph's
shoulder, or a tree-trunk.
This picture was painted in 1851, when Corot had not yet developed
that style which was to mark all his later work.
Besides this picture he painted "Paysage," "The Bathers" "Ville
d'Arvay," "Willows near Arras," "The Bent Tree," "A Gust of Wind," and
others.
XI
CORREGGIO (ANTONIO ALLEGRI)
(Pronounced Cor-rage'jyo Ahl-lay'gree)
_School of Parma_
1494(?)-1534
_Pupil of Mantegna_
When Correggio was a little boy, he lived in the odour of spices,
which were kept upon his father's shop-shelves. He was a highly-spiced
little boy and man, although the most timid and shrinking. His
imagination was the liveliest possible.
The spice merchant lived in the town of Correggio, and thus the artist
got his name. Correggio knew what should be inside the lovely flesh of
his painted figures before he began to paint them, because he studied
anatomy in a truly scientific manner before he studied painting.
Probably no other artist up to that time, had ever begun with the bare
bones of his models, but Correggio may be said to have worked from the
inside out. He learned about the structure of the human frame from
Dr. Giovanni Battista Lombardi, and showed his gratitude to his
teacher by painting a picture "Il Medico del Correggio" (Correggio's
Physician), and presenting it to Doctor Lombardi.
Now Correggio's childhood, or at least his early manhood, could not
have been spent in poverty, because it is known that he used the most
expensive colours to paint with, painted upon the finest of canvas,
while greater artists had often to be content with boards. He also
painted upon copper plates, and it is said that he hired Begarelli, a
sculptor of much fame, to make models in relief for him to copy for
the pictures he painted on the cupolas of the churches in Parma. That
sculptor's services must have been expensive.
On the lovely island of Capri, in the Franciscan convent, will be
found one of his first pictures, painted when Correggio was about
nineteen years old.