Constable’s father, Golding
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN Maria and Constable was at the centre of both their lives, but other factors impinged. Maria’s health, for one thing: there were frequent signs it was shaky, though her bouts of frailness never caused Constable to slacken his wooing. Moreover, he had domestic problems of his own. In the small hours of 10 November 1812 a fire broke out at 63 Charlotte Street, where he lived above the apartment and upholstery workshop of Richard Weight and his family; the artist and his belongings had to be evacuated. One of the first things he did next day was write to Maria in Bognor in case she had somehow heard of the fire and was worried about him. He had lost nothing; he was troubled only by the alarm, bustle and inconvenience. His Uncle David offered him a bed in Portland Place, and the dentist across the street, John Henderson, lent him a room to paint in while the Weights’ premises were repaired. A week later Constable had leisure to write again to Maria giving her more details of the minor calamity. The fire had spread fast through Weight’s workshop and the back of the house, and he had made a point of first rescuing his writing desk, ‘containing my most valuable letters’ (we can guess from whom). Half dressed, without shoes or waistcoat, he managed to calm the distraught Weights and then help neighbours move bits and pieces into the street. The fire engine took an hour to arrive and stop the flames from spreading further. While Constable was carrying a large picture belonging to Lady Heathcote down the stairs, a window blew in and showered him with glass. He took the picture over to Joseph Farington’s. On getting back, he found the Weights’ servant woman in great distress: her savings were in the garret, under her pillow. Constable ran upstairs through the smoke and rescued what she called her ‘pockets’, the purses which contained ‘all her fortune’.
Constable never had a wide circle of acquaintance but he always had several good friends. At this time he was getting to know better one who would be among the very best – John Fisher, nephew of the Bishop of Salisbury, who had been ordained as a priest in June 1812. He had written to Constable in May, unsuccessfully trying to tempt him to Salisbury again: ‘We will rise with the sun, breakfast, & then out for the rest of the day – if we tire of drawing we can read or bathe and then home at nightfall to a short dinner.’ Young Reverend Fisher wasn’t afraid to give Constable the benefit of his judgement on the artist’s paintings. Shortly after the Charlotte Street fire he thanked Constable for a painting which, gift or not, had struck one observer as gloomy. Furthermore, wrote Fisher, ‘It does not sollicit attention. And this I think is true of all your pictures & the real cause of your want of popularity.’ Fisher suggested Rubens as a painter whose works illuminated a room and hence gave a sense of cheerfulness. He thought Constable had the same fault as his pictures, being too unassertive, ‘too honest and high-minded to push himself’. However, he enjoyed the three landscapes Constable sent to Somerset House in 1813. One of them, Boys Fishing, was one of the largest works he had yet painted, and according to Robert Hunt in The Examiner (30 May 1813) was ‘silvery, sparkling, and true to the greyish-green colouring of our English summer landscapes.’ (To modern eyes it looks rather ye olde quaint, though that may be partly because it has been much overpainted and retouched.)1 Fisher, after seeing the exhibition, wrote to say that of all the exhibits, ‘I only like one better & that is a picture of pictures, the Frost of Turner. [This was Turner’s Frosty Morning.] But then you need not repine at this decision of mine; you are a great man like Buonoparte and are only beat by a frost.’ At the Academy dinner, Constable sat opposite Benjamin West and Thomas Lawrence, and next to Turner, his celebrated contemporary, whom he saw as a fellow painter seemingly for the first time. He reported to Maria, ‘I was a good deal entertained with Turner. I always expected to find him what I did – he is uncouth but has a wonderfull range of mind.’
At close quarters with celebrity and genius, Constable must have felt he was at last on the verge of real acceptance, if not popularity. His failure – despite Stothard’s backing – to get elected as an Associate in 1812 was put behind him. West said that the Council thought he had made a very great advance this year. The Stour, painted large, seemed to offer a way ahead. David Pike Watts, a governor of the British Institution and relentless booster of his nephew, gave him a ticket to the banquet opening a big BI exhibition of Reynolds’s works. At this Constable talked to Bishop Fisher and Sir George Beaumont, and he saw Mrs Siddons and Lord Byron. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage had come out the year before to immense applause, and Constable was not immune to the almost tangible aura of fame. He wrote a few days later to Maria, as if with fellow feeling for Byron, ‘His poetry is of the most melancholy kind, but there is great ability.’
Constable had complained in late 1811 about the loneliness of his vocation and how his mind preyed on itself. Both the sunny moments and the dark periods got into his painting. Stothard, whose deafness also isolated him, was twenty-one years older but liked Constable and had a remedy for his depressions: long walks. One day in early June 1812, he set off with Stothard at 6 a.m. from central London. He wrote to Maria, ‘We breakfasted at Putney – went over Wimbledon Common – & passed three hours at least in Coomb Wood (Stothard is a butterfly catcher), where we dined by a spring – then back to Richmond by the park, and enjoyed the view – and home by the river.’ Their friendship didn’t preclude arguments about Art. Farington recorded in his diary Constable’s expression of surprise that ‘so ingenious an Artist [as Stothard] should be solely engrossed in imitating Rubens. Stothard, on the contrary, equally disapproved Constable’s choice of landscape in painting simple scenes, Mills, & c.’2
Some Academicians were beginning to see the merit of Constable’s so-called simple scenes. Farington himself approved of Boys Fishing and Henry Thomson told Constable he would get his vote for Associate membership, though Constable had little expectation of being elected. Perhaps the most pleasing thing of all, when Boys Fishing was shown at the British Institution six months after its RA appearance, a purchaser appeared who was neither a relative nor close friend: James Carpenter, bookseller in Old Bond Street, wanted the picture, though he couldn’t pay entirely in money. He offered twenty guineas and ‘Books to a certain amount beyond that Sum’. Constable accepted, and often bought books from Carpenter thereafter.3 His portrait efforts (at £15 a head) for Lady Louisa Manners, Lady Heathcote, H.G. Lewis and the Reverend George Bridgeman, among others, were bringing in cash. When Constable left London for what he called his beloved Bergholt at the end of June 1813, he was able to write proudly to Maria that for the first time in his life he did so with ‘pockets full of money. I am entirely free of debt … and I have required no assistance from my father for some time.’
Constable had addressed Maria as ‘Miss Bicknell’ in May as he tried to obey her strictures on their corresponding by at least curtailing the fondness he expressed, but she cracked first: in early June she began a letter to him, ‘My dear John’. In late August she wrote from Richmond, ‘I wish I could divest myself of feeling so like a culprit when I write to you.’ (She knew she was breaking the rules.) ‘I think of you equally if I write, or do not write …’ She read, probably to please him, James Northcote’s Memoirs of Sir Joshua Reynolds, Bart., which had just been published.4 When he got back to Charlotte Street in November, with many drawings and a tiny sketchbook crammed with ‘hasty memorandums’ of places and prospects and items he had picked up in the Stour valley – ‘plants – ferns – distances’ – he appears to have accepted that they should meet at most once a month; he was consoled, he said, by the thought that ‘our hearts are one.’ But consolation didn’t come easy. On 22 December 1813 prowling around St James’s he saw Maria and her mother in the street; Maria wasn’t looking well. The next day he wrote to her to say he had been out searching for her again all morning. Finally he was lurking by the railings across from their house when he had the mortification of seeing her and her sister Catherine go into the Bicknell residence and failed to get them to notice him. ‘You may judge how I feel when I return to my room,’ he complained. He had been half frozen, since he had been out for hours without his greatcoat. ‘I detest the sight of my wretched pictures.’
Some of his old certainties were collapsing. He had been brought up as a communicant in the Church of England: ‘Ever since I have been of age to receive the Sacrament I have never failed of receiving it on X’mas day … I really fear that my mind is not in a fit state for so solemn an occasion.’ He had told the Gubbinses that he would spend Christmas with them in Epsom, but he seems to have stayed in London because he was worried about Maria’s health. Fortunately John Fisher came to see him just before Christmas and talked comfortingly. And Fisher’s uncle, the Bishop, continued to give support – Constable spent a pleasant day with the Bishop and his wife in early February 1814. But he declined to go to a party at his uncle David’s: since, he said, parties only increased his melancholy, ‘I am turned hermit.’
It was a winter of bitter cold. The Thames iced over, the streets were full of dirty, frozen slush, and the contents of chamberpots were frozen under beds. The snow prevented the lovers from seeing each other and the Bicknell fireside provided Maria with no cheer; both her mother and sister Louisa were ill. In mid-February, after a short thaw, Maria wrote to Constable to say she couldn’t write to him weekly (as he wanted) but would write as often as possible; she hadn’t been well. ‘This sudden change again to extreme cold has affected my chest.’ She hoped he would see ‘the impropriety of our walking together circumstanced as I am’. Constable seems to have felt suddenly that time was passing, the fates unrelenting. Was there ever going to be a way out of this? He wrote to John Dunthorne asking him to send young Johnny to Charlotte Street. ‘I think he may be usefull to stimulate me to work, by setting my palate [sic] &c. &c. – which you know is a great help and keeps one cheerfull.’ Constable’s mother didn’t think this a good idea: Johnny, now sixteen, might be ‘company, but he cannot be a companion, & that is what you want to ascend, my dear John – not descend.’ Maria the solicitor’s daughter was the way ahead, the artisan Dunthornes were not. Constable disagreed with his mother’s judgement: he wrote to Maria that Johnny ‘is not at all vulgar and [is] naturally very clever – but had he not these good qualities I should love him for his father’s sake’. Johnny came but didn’t stay long; he left with tears in his eyes, promised another visit by Constable.
In mid-February Maria told Constable that she wouldn’t see him again until May. He prayed she would at any rate write to him: ‘No lover will ever think no news good news.’ She replied it was improper for them to walk out together. But a young woman’s right to change her mind was soon manifest. In March she reserved some seats at Covent Garden Theatre and wrote to Constable, ‘Can you my dear John brave these cold nights without any danger of getting cold?’ She had ‘secured places in box 36 up one pair of stairs. March 17th.’ The play the lovers saw was ‘not calculated to cheer one’, John wrote, hoping ‘the next will be a comedy’. Meanwhile, he was fence-mending with the rector. Constable called on Dr Rhudde in Stratton Street and found him coolly polite as always and not exactly encouraging.
Towards the end of April Constable handed in two landscapes as his entries for the Academy exhibition. The first, Ploughing Scene in Suffolk, shows a field on the Bergholt slopes of Dedham Vale, with a team of horses pulling a plough. After summer ploughing the field remained fallow until it was manured in the autumn and sown for the winter. The picture was given a quotation in the exhibition catalogue – the first time Constable had done this, perhaps taking note of how successful Academicians such as Turner promoted their pictures that way. Constable used two lines from The Farmer’s Boy by the best-selling Suffolk poet Robert Bloomfield: ‘But unassisted through each toilsome day, / With smiling brow the ploughman cleaves his way.’ Just how smiling the ploughman might be after a day’s toil is a moot point – his brow is invisible – but the painting itself is a wonderful example of how Constable could mimic the conditions of one season in the country while working in the city in another. A small low copse makes a not-quite-horizontal slash of darkness across the picture’s middle ground. Large loose clouds allow pools of sunlight to illuminate distant meadows and part of the ‘summerland’ field in which the ploughman stoops over his plough. England was probably never better and more beautifully cultivated than now, and Constable caught the moment.
After handing in this, and a slightly darker and moodier scene showing Willy Lott’s cottage and a ferryman poling his boat across the Stour at Flatford, Constable went up to Suffolk for a week. He told Maria that Bergholt looked ‘uncommonly beautifull’; he took ‘several beautifull walks’ and rode with his sister Mary to visit the Earl and Countess of Dysart at Helmingham Hall. When he returned to London he called at Somerset House to check on his creations. Sam Strowger, one of his best friends there, had been pleased to tell him that some paintings had been moved since their proximity injured the effect of Constable’s.5 Constable himself was happy with ‘the look and situation’ of Ploughing Scene. Although Turner’s Dido and Aeneas was getting a lot of attention, he said that he would rather be the author of his own landscape with the ploughman. Many Academicians thought his Ploughing Scene ‘as genuine a peice of study as there is to be found in the room’. John Allnutt, wine merchant and stockbreeder of Clapham Common, a perceptive art patron, liked it too and bought it at the following winter’s BI exhibition. Allnutt, even more than James Carpenter, was a complete stranger to the artist, and this lack of prior connections particularly delighted Constable. Was a public coming to him at last?
The 1814 Academy exhibition involved Constable in one disagreeable incident. Maria visited it with her father, and when Constable encountered them, he failed to greet Mr Bicknell with a bow. His omission was taken for disrespect. Constable thought that, as the younger man (albeit almost thirty-eight), he was merely refraining from pushing himself forward in an impertinent manner. Maria was cross, but Constable explained and apologised; he hadn’t intended any slight. Then she relented – the way Constable now mentioned her father made her happy, and it was a pity that ‘existing circumstances should preclude your being better acquainted’. The circumstances, a note from her on 18 May made clear, included their continued lack of ‘that most necessary evil, money’. (A lack spelled out a month later when she added that ‘people cannot live now upon four hundred a year’.) And the circumstances made both parties ultra-sensitive. When Constable suggested he might visit Maria when she and Louisa were staying at Richmond, she said no; he complained she wasn’t the Maria he once knew, and this made her miserable. But a few weeks later, when he was again in Suffolk, she wrote him a ‘truly affectionate’ letter that made him happy.
East Bergholt in June: although cut off from her, he knew that he was ‘among every blessing and endearment that can be found in this world’. Not only was he with his family but he had ‘health and leisure to pursue my “longings after fame”, in these dear scenes which I must always prefer and love to any other … The village is now in great beauty. I think I never saw the foliage so promising.’ Constable spent most of the summer there. He made one trip in June to visit the Reverend W.W. Driffield at Feering. Reverend Driffield, who had christened Constable as an endangered infant, took him south to Maldon and Southend. Constable walked along the banks of the Thames estuary and delighted in ‘the melancholy grandeur of a seashore’. He wrote to Maria, ‘At Hadleigh there is a ruin of a castle which from its situation is a really fine place – it commands a view of the Kent hills, the Nore and North Foreland & looking many miles to sea.’ He spent the second half of July in London, where he lobbied Farington about becoming an Associate and Farington told him a common objection to his pictures was that they were unfinished – Constable should study Claude’s manner of completing. This was advice Constable could go along with – and it was no hardship to look at the two Claudes of J.J. Angerstein in Pall Mall.6
Maria had been invited to Wales in the autumn and Constable entreated her – ‘my beloved Child’ – to go. But instead she went with Louisa first to a house her father had rented in Wimbledon and then to Brighton, for sea air. She and Constable managed to meet once in London. He was very low in spirits, particularly as she told him she wouldn’t see him again for a time: ‘It would not you know have been right, for Louisa and I only to have admitted so formidable a personage under our roof, the village would have rose in arms to our relief.’ So he spent the following few months mostly in East Bergholt, avoiding people other than such visiting relatives as the Whalleys and the Gubbinses. James Gubbins, now an army captain, was his favourite cousin and had stories to tell of his brother Richard, who had been at the capture of Washington. His family was anxious ‘lest he should be knocked on the head by those wretched Americans.’ Constable knew he was being unsociable, for example when he begged to be let off a dinner with the curate Mr Robertson, and he was happy to be – as he told Maria – ‘almost entirely in the fields’. He had an object to pursue that filled his mind and precluded melancholy. The landscapes he was at work on were better than usual – his work was consolation for not being with her – and though he had seen her only once since spring, he hoped winter would bring more cheering prospects. ‘And when this unnatural and useless persecution which now embitters both our lives, shall have [ceased] we shall yet be happy … I can hardly tell you what I feel at the sight from the window where I am now writing of the feilds in which we have so often walked. A beautifull calm autumnal setting sun is glowing upon the gardens of the Rectory and on adjacent feilds where some of the happiest hours of my life were passed.’ He didn’t need to add ‘with you’.
Among the paintings he did that wonderfully fine summer and autumn were several that had old subject matter but seemingly new inspiration. Farington might have claimed his admonition to study Claude was paying off. Constable, impelled by love, was perhaps simply digging deeper in his own ground. A manure pile, symbol of good husbandry, figured in the foreground of a picture of the Stour valley that he painted for Philadelphia Godfrey, daughter of Peter Godfrey of Old Hall; it was a gift from her husband-to-be, a landowner named Thomas Fitzhugh, so that she would have at her new home in London a view from her old home in Suffolk. Constable usually wrote to Maria on Sundays but occasionally gave in to the temptations of fine weather, as on 25 October when he walked through the woods to Nayland to visit his invalid aunt. He knew Maria’s curiosity was piqued by Miss Godfrey’s marriage and several times he wrote to pass on titbits. He let her know, for example, that Mr Fitzhugh was ‘extremely rich … and a college friend of Mr Godfrey’s. I beleive he is near thirty years older than Miss G [he was in fact forty-four years old] but in the plenitude of his wealth that was not thought of … I am told there is a very great attachment between them.’
The chief product of his Bergholt painting season was Boat-Building. A pencil sketch for this was made in early September beside the excavated dry dock, near Flatford Mill, where barges were constructed for Constable’s father’s grain and coal business. The actual painting was done entirely in the open air; as he later told the engraver David Lucas, he worked all afternoon until smoke from a nearby chimney announced fire being lit for the preparation of supper.7 As with the painting for Miss Godfrey, Constable dealt in the detail of work, though here it was not moving manure but making a barge in its pit – a massive wooden-shoe of a craft, almost an ark, being born. Timbers were being hewn with saw and adze, and pitch was being heated in an iron pot for caulking the planking. The fabric of the huge boat is precisely rendered. The green shadows suggest it is afternoon. The fertile ground here was not Squire Godfrey’s but Golding Constable’s, whose artist son may have been honouring some of the tools of the trades that were used in Constable businesses and helped pay his own allowance.
When he left the village in early November, Constable told Maria that his mother thought regretfully that her son’s propensity to avoid notice seemed to have increased. He acknowledged that although five or six years before he had been ‘a little on tiptoe for fame and emolument’, he wasn’t any longer seeking honours. This attitude made Maria cross. She didn’t see how he could congratulate himself on it. She believed it strange that a professional man should shun society the way he did; it wouldn’t help him get ahead. If he wanted to remain single, fair enough. But she wanted him noticed, and, arranging to meet the recluse in mid-November in St James’s Square, she added: ‘I must have you known, and then to be admired will be the natural consequence.’ Possibly Constable was preparing himself for what by now seemed natural disappointment, which quickly came. In the elections for Associate members of the Royal Academy, he once again failed. Worse, one of the two successful candidates was Richard Ramsay Reinagle, who had an easy victory; this was anguish indeed.8
While Constable readjusted to London’s ‘brick walls and dirty streets’, Mrs Constable wrote to tell him of the 5 November celebrations in the village: ‘plenty of squibs and crackers … but no bonfires.’ She was worried about Maria returning from her stay in Brighton and the effect on her son: ‘I dread your waiting jobs under the Lady’s window for fear of colds & pains in the face & teeth.’ A month later she let him know that his father had again been thinking about the uncertainties of John’s profession and – to ‘make his death bed easy’ – was planning to put one or two thousand pounds into an annuity for his son. Mr Constable wasn’t well during the early winter; in the new year he was bothered by poor circulation resulting in chilblains, though he retained a ‘composed state of mind – no perplexities within, & every comfort without’. Constable was warned his father showed ‘symptoms of dissolution’ – even Dr Rhudde sent to ask how he was – and he made a quick visit to Bergholt to see the seventy-seven-year-old merchant. However, by mid-February Mr Travis, the local doctor, decided that Mr Constable was out of the woods; the poultice on his foot was removed; his toes were healed. Soon he was having ‘tollerable good nights’ and was behaving ‘very mild and kind’.
The fact that Constable and Maria Bicknell exchanged few letters in the first months of 1815 suggests that they were managing to meet quite frequently. In any event, Mr Bicknell now decided to stop fighting fate. Maria wrote on 23 February to give Constable the glad news that her father had given permission for her to receive him in their Spring Gardens house as ‘an occasional visitor’. This was insufficient for Constable, who held out for a personal invitation from Mr Bicknell. He had been formally dismissed, ‘with expressions the most mortifying to a man of honor’, and he wanted to be formally assured he would be welcome. (He could be just as unbending as Maria’s father and grandfather.) Constable’s mother didn’t make too much of this semi-acceptance of her son as a satisfactory suitor. She reminded Constable to remember Dr Rhudde’s birthday in early March with all due respects. She also took the side of Hannah Dunthorne in a contretemps she had had with John Dunthorne, her husband, telling Constable that she didn’t agree with him when he said, ‘Dunthorne’s old woman’s conduct has always been of the worst kind towards him.’ Mrs Constable protested that Hannah had taken in Dunthorne without a shilling and married him, putting him ‘in possession of her house, furniture, trade, and what very property she had’. He ought to be grateful. ‘I assure myself Miss B. would not countenance for a moment such a character.’
This was the last bit of maternal diplomacy Constable was subject to. On the cold morning of 9 March, Dr Rhudde’s 81st birthday, Ann Constable went outside after breakfast to do some gardening and felt giddy. She collapsed. It seems to have been a stroke for her voice was affected and her left side partly paralysed. Mr Travis attended to Mrs Constable on her sofa; he bled her, which proved a temporary relief, but she continued to weaken. Prayers were said for her at the Sunday evening service conducted by Reverend Robertson. Abram sent word to London to his brother John, who apparently followed their sister Martha to Bergholt. But Ann Constable lingered on, and they had both returned to London – Martha to look after her young family, John to work on his paintings for the upcoming RA exhibition – when they heard of their mother’s death at the end of March. She was not quite sixty-seven. She was buried on 4 April in the churchyard next door to her house.
Constable was not at the graveside. Possibly he felt it enough that he had been home just before when she was still alive and he was needed most. Possibly he was up to his neck in his painting and simply unable to do as Abram suggested, throw himself into the mail coach on Monday night to be with his family for the funeral on Tuesday. And possibly the sudden loss of his mother had shattered him, rendered him immobile; it was a Constable trait to turn inwards, in private grief, at such moments, as later events would show. Abram understood – John shouldn’t be uneasy about it – and sent news that Dunthorne went on as usual and their father was all the better for a letter John had written to him; he had got Abram to read it twice to him and ‘quite lighted up with pleasure’.
Soon Mr Constable had recovered enough from the loss of his wife to call in William Mason, the Colchester solicitor and husband of their relative Anne Parmenter. Mr Mason came several times to redraw Golding Constable’s will and lessen any difficulties that might arise on his death. Mr Constable wanted to leave Abram in charge of the business but give all his children equal shares in it. And on 6 May he wrote his son John a heartfelt letter. Addressing him as ‘Honest John’, he said his wife’s death had brought him also nearly to the grave but he was now stronger and had been out several times in his gig. ‘My breath at times is very short, but not more so than usual.’ He sounded particularly pleased with news of John’s paintings at the Academy. ‘Mrs Coyle of Dedham lent us a Catalogue of the Exhibition. She saw your pictures & spoke highly of them.’
That year Constable showed eight pictures, the maximum permitted. Boat-Building was one and the view of the Stour valley for Philadelphia Godfrey another. There were good notices with ‘reservations’ – ‘coarsely sketchy’ was The Examiner’s qualified admiration of Constable’s ‘sparkling sunlight’ and ‘general character of truth’, while The New Monthly Magazine liked his freshness and colouring but regretted that his performances, ‘from want of finish, are sketches rather than pictures’.9
Dr Rhudde was remarkably attentive to the Constables through this period. He enquired several times from Abram about Golding Constable during his illness, and when Constable went up to East Bergholt in mid-May to visit his father and paint his portrait, the rector spoke to him at the door of his pew in church and asked for news of Mr Constable. Was the rector’s bark worse than his bite? Or was the Great Caesar influenced by his own immediate grief. He had just preached ‘a most consolatory sermon’; his own daughter, Maria’s mother, had died nine days before in London. She had been an invalid for the past ten years but it was still a shock for many, including Constable. He wrote to Maria on 21 May, ‘That we should both of us have lost our nearest friends (the nearest we can ever have upon earth) within so short a time of each other is truly melancholy.’ It made him miss Maria all the more.
In the unsettled world beyond, where ‘that scoundrel Bonaparte’ as Abram called him was once again at large, other losses now affected the Constables. On 18 June the Battle of Waterloo took place. Constable spent the day at the Whalleys in East Ham, taken there by David Pike Watts. Two of Constable’s cousins, sons of his mother’s sisters, Lieutenant Thomas Allen and Captain James Gubbins, were on the bloody field. After a long and anxious wait, their families learned that Thomas had survived but James had not. James Gubbins, Constable said a few months after this, was one of the most interesting men he had known. Gubbins had run up great debts as a cavalry officer, but Constable’s mother had nevertheless been impressed by her nephew’s sense of style and had the previous Christmas sent John some home-made shirts, with collars cut in the up-to-date fashion approved by James Gubbins. It was first reported, in the Gentleman’s Magazine, that the captain had died after being hit by a cannonball, while leading his troop in a charge. Later, it was announced that his frightened horse had carried him into enemy lines where, although he surrendered, a French officer killed him. Constable’s pleasure that the day was saved for Britain (and for the forces of legitimate monarchy), preventing the overthrow of much he held dear, was thus balanced by his distress at the death of his cousin and so many of James’s comrades.
For the second year running it was a lovely summer. But Constable spent the first part of it indoors, in London, working twelve, sometimes fourteen hours a day on the background for a portrait by another artist: George Dawe’s portrait of the actress Eliza O’Neill, a current Juliet, propped up winsomely against a massive balustrade. At least being in London gave him the opportunity to see Maria, now staying in a cottage her father had rented in Putney; he met her on Putney Bridge on 3 July, a few days before leaving for Suffolk. From there he reported, ‘I never saw dear old Bergholt half so beautifull before as now.’ His father had felt buoyant enough on his son’s birthday to raise a glass, drinking the health of ‘the painter and his pictures’, but Travis the surgeon warned the family to beware of sudden change. As it was, Mr Constable was going on his usual rides and going to church, taking the sacrament. The village rumour mill was also working hard: word had it that Dr Rhudde had made a new will, leaving what had been intended for his daughter, Maria’s mother, to his son-in-law, Mr Bicknell, and granddaughters. The rector gave the impression of having a new broom to sweep with. On the Sunday after Mrs Bicknell’s death he told the congregation in his sermon that it was wrong at such points to have long lamentations.10
Constable’s father, Golding
After being stuck in the studio at Dawe’s, painting in the open air was wonderful for him – as Maria noted almost jealously in a letter of 20 July. Constable did an oil sketch at the annual village fair, when the locals celebrated the great victory over Napoleon with beef, beer, a band and fireworks, and by hanging the Corsican upstart in effigy.11 Among several out-of-doors scenes he painted slightly further afield were a sketch of Stoke-by-Nayland and a view of the hamlet of Brightwell, near Woodbridge. The latter was the result of a request from a clergyman and antiquary, the Reverend F.H. Barnwell, and Constable went there on an excursion that took in Framlingham Castle and Ipswich. The Brightwell picture shows ‘the church as it appears above a wood’ (as he wrote to Maria). It is a little gem, six and a half by nine inches, oil on panel. A lane winds into a dip between fields and scattered trees, with farm buildings on the right and the red-tiled roof and greystone tower of the church on the ridge-line horizon. It is a bright though slightly overcast day, the scene rendered boldly and simply, almost as if enamelled, with sharply contrasted areas of green vegetation and grey cloud. Happiness seemed to have improved Constable’s powers of concentration and focus. In late August, he wrote to Maria, ‘I live almost wholly in the feilds and see nobody but the harvest men.’ By mid-September, he was ‘perfectly bronzed’.
Two domestic views were apparently painted just before and after Brightwell: outdoors painted from indoors. They show the Constable family’s kitchen garden and flower garden, seen from an upstairs window in East Bergholt House, respectively in the morning and evening. They have the same intensity and brilliance as the Brightwell picture, cut into by deep areas of darkness. In the kitchen-garden painting, the rectory – Dr Rhudde’s house – can be seen in the central distance, with the Constable windmill on the horizon to the left.12 Although the fields where he and Maria had met in the first years of their getting to know one another may have been in his mind, it seems likely that his parents were in the forefront of his thoughts. Mrs Constable had been working in the gardens when she was struck with her fatal giddiness. Constable never exhibited or tried to sell these paintings. They give an almost elegiac sense of things he wanted to register as permanently as he could. It was as though he was looking at them for the last time, before they disappeared or he went away.