ON 5 JANUARY, in bleak midwinter, Constable told Fisher that he was ‘writing this hasty scrawl [in the] dark before a six foot canvas – which I have just launched with all my usual anxieties’. This was his sixth six-footer, and he had been planning it for nearly two months. Fisher thought a bit more diversity in Constable’s subject matter and mood would help, but the artist said he wasn’t about to vary his plans ‘to keep the Publick in good humour’. There were to be two pen-and-wash studies and a full-size oil sketch, and despite his confessed anxieties, in his next letter to his friend he said the subject was ‘most promising … It is [a] canal, and full of the bustle incident to such a scene where four or five boats are passing with dogs, horses, boys, & men & women & children, and best of all old timber-props, water plants, willow stumps, sedges, old nets, &c&c&c.’ But it didn’t come easy. He was distracted by some portrait work: a group picture of the Lambert family of Woodmansterne, near Croydon, friends of the Bicknells. Then he didn’t have a great deal of stuff in his store for this particular spot on the Stour, the so-called canal, and depended much on memories of the towpath along which he had walked to school in Dedham.1
The scene was at the Float Jump, where a low wooden barrier across the towpath kept cattle from getting by and the horses, which towed the barges, could be jumped over it. The artist looked from the south, on the land side of the river bank and a sluice which connected a field to the river; Flatford was well downstream to the right. A barge was being poled across the river to collect its horse. The first study shows a horse standing at the barrier. The second shows a riderless horse vaulting the Jump. The large oil sketch shows a youthful rider hanging on tight as the horse leaps over the Jump like a hunter or cavalry charger. Between the oil sketch and the exhibited painting there were further changes: a barge whose prow had just entered the picture in the sketch has passed by downstream; the first barge has sprouted a mast, with a sail ready for hoisting. The lad riding the horse is dressed distinctly in waistcoat and hat. A bent and pollarded willow on the near bank has been slightly straightened and moved from in front of the horse to behind it, removing the sense that it is getting in the way of the leap. Dedham church is at the right-hand edge of the painting, though it wouldn’t have been visible from this angle. In all the pictures – studies, full-size sketch and finished piece – there is an excitement that mounts. In the first study it is evident in the vigorous pen work. In the second it is made clear in the turmoil of clouds and the upward thrust of the horse. Most suggestive of movement is the big oil sketch, with its cloud-dark, windy sky. But on this occasion one can approve the finished painting most (it isn’t too finished). The jumble of matter on the river bank in the foreground – old timbers, the little bridge carrying the towpath over the sluice-gate, an eel trap, a net, a moorhen flapping frightened from its nest, various plants and weeds – were all detailed in a letter he wrote to a possible buyer later in the year. The startled moorhen, based on a separate sketch, was a late addition. As he drove the paint on to the canvas, he gave the impression that more senses were involved than just his sight: he could hear the Stour water splashing through the sluice and the wind stirring the willows; he could smell the mud and slime on the banks.2 Nevertheless, he wasn’t satisfied with it. It was a rush to get it to Somerset House; the painting should have stayed in his painting room several weeks longer; and after it had been sent in he wrote to Fisher, ‘No one picture ever departed from my easil with more anxiety …’ Possibly its incompletion was part of its success.
Fisher was told Constable’s news: ‘My wife and I are going to exhibit at the same time.’ But Maria beat him to it; her creation was indeed premature. Emily Constable was born at 10 p.m. on 29 March, the same date on which Charles Golding, her second brother, had been born four years before.3 It indicated a regularity in their marital getting-togethers in early summers, despite her frailty. Maria wasn’t at all well during the later stages of the pregnancy, and she seemed knocked about by the birth of her fifth child. Afterwards she managed to breastfeed the baby but, Constable reported to Fisher, ‘is in a sad weak condition – and we are obliged to watch her carefully’. Emily was to be also known as Emma, sometimes spelled Ema, and she figured in a sweet undated drawing Constable later did of her leaning over the arm of an elegant chair, looking up at the artist, her father, with large sad eyes.
Despite Mr Pulham’s prognosis, there was no test of his reputation in the Academy elections that year: no member had vacated his seat, so there was no vote. There was also no sign of Fisher’s hope being fulfilled that Constable’s gold medal from France would cause ‘the stupid English public’ to think there was something in him. But Constable remained grateful for Fisher’s ‘early notice’ and ‘friendship in my obscurity’. He was sure ‘My reputation at home among my brother artists [is] dayly gaining ground, & I deeply feel the honour of having found an original style & independent of him who would be Lord over all – I mean Turner …’ (How Turner felt about Constable was kept, as was his way, well hidden.) Constable showed three paintings (including The Leaping Horse) at the Academy exhibition, which were generally admired; the Morning Chronicle mentioned ‘the pleasing peculiarities of this artist’s style’. The diarist Henry Crabb Robinson thought Turner’s Dieppe magnificent but could ‘understand why such artists as Constable and Collins are preferred’ – even in a compliment, being linked with Collins would not have pleased Constable.4 The other two RA paintings were of Hampstead – views of Branch Hill Pond and Child’s Hill – and were bought by the iron manufacturer Francis Darby after another purchaser backed out following ‘serious losses in India’. Darby’s father had built the celebrated Iron Bridge over the Severn at Coalbrookdale. Darby paid Constable 130 guineas for the Hampstead pair, getting a twenty-guinea discount on the asking price because Constable ‘felt flattered that an application should be made to me from an entire stranger … for the pictures’ sake alone’.5 With Johnny Dunthorne at hand to help, Constable then set about making a set of copies for Charles Schroth in Paris.
Although The Leaping Horse found no purchaser in Constable’s lifetime, the year became a good one for Constable. The French Embassy had handed him his gold medal in early April. Schroth had ordered three more paintings for his gallery and the reception they received was – Schroth thought – even warmer than that given Constable’s pictures in the Louvre. A letter telling Constable about this arrived courtesy of Delacroix. Firmin Didot, a Parisian printer from the rue Jacob who was introduced by Arrowsmith, also ordered three, and Arrowsmith two more. ‘These all make income,’ Constable told Fisher, happily. In August he sent The White Horse and another painting to the Musée Royale in Lille; dear obliging Fisher had lent his prized picture for a show that year at the British Institution and perhaps expected its immediate return, but Constable sent it off to Flanders without asking. On 10 September he craved Fisher’s forgiveness for this but assumed he would be glad The White Horse was to be seen by the art lovers of Lille in company with portraits by Sir Thomas Lawrence. One of Constable’s worries hadn’t been about himself or his family but the health of his old patron Bishop Fisher. The Bishop got ‘cold in his loins’ out riding in the sharp easterly winds of early April and died a month later. His cheerful demands for brighter skies over his cathedral were gone for ever.
Maria and the children were once again sent off to Hampstead for the summer, but it doesn’t seem to have helped either Maria or Constable. He drew her around this time, her face looking rather unhealthily swollen. He complained to Fisher at the end of their stay, ‘Hampstead is a wretched place – so expensive – and as it was so near I made my home at neither place – I was between two chairs – & could do nothing.’ He wrote to Francis Darby, ‘Could I divest myself of anxiety of mind I should never ail anything. My life is a struggle between my “social affections” and my “love of art” ’. He recalled Lord Bacon’s remark that ‘single men are the best servants of the publick’. He – Constable – had a wife in delicate health and five small children. ‘I am not happy apart from them even for a few days, or hours, and the summer months separate us too much, and disturb my quiet habits at my easil.’ Fisher had come to a similar diagnosis and wrote, ‘Whatever you do, Constable, get thee rid of anxiety. It hurts the stomach more than arsenic. It generates only fresh cause for anxiety, by producing inaction and loss of time.’ Constable acted. On 31 August he moved his family down to Brighton. They stayed first in Russell Square, an enclave of two-storey terraced houses with a central garden, a short block from the seafront, and then moved to Canne Street in December.6
In Charlotte Street Constable resumed his journal for Maria. What he had had for dinner, visitors from Flatford, painting matters, their wedding anniversary, the cats and the hens. Master Billy had been pestering the goldfish, putting his paw in their bowl and frightening them, but next day was himself severely alarmed by the crowing of the cock. Friday 16 September was headlined by the journal writer ‘A Grand Epoch’:
This morning was ushered by a prodigious battle with the fowls in the garden – the black hen making a great to-do & cackling – the cock strutting about and crowing – and Billy looking at them in great astonishment from the back kitchen window. When all was quiet I looked into the brew house & saw her on the nest which I had made, and at breakfast – Elizabeth [Sarah’s replacement as maid] brought me in a beautifull egg – probably the first hen’s egg ever laid on the premises.
How much we have changed the circumstances of this house from what it was in Mr Farrington’s time – his attics turned into nurseries – a beautifull baby born in his bedroom – his washhouse, turned into a brew house – his back parlor, which contained all his prints, turned into a bed room – his painting room, made habitable – besides, which is best of all, made to produce better pictures than he could make …
And the contented householder congratulated Maria and himself on their domestic achievement before describing further antics of the cats, and an errand he had run on behalf of the AGBI to take £4 to an artist’s widow. He was still looking after ‘old Fontaine’ from time to time and sending on to him donations from other people ‘so that he is almost out of the difficulties, having paid all his rent, and got many things out of pawn’. When the Constables’ milkman lost one of his cows, Constable lent him £10, to be repaid when he could afford it.
His own financial condition wasn’t prosperous but (he told Fisher in September) wasn’t worse than usual. It was the year of a London banking crisis. Confidence had collapsed after a surge of reckless promotion of new companies, including one which was going to drain the Red Sea and find treasure left by the Old Testament Jews when fleeing Egypt.7 Given the shaky times, ‘not worse than usual’ wasn’t bad. Abram – though suffering losses of his own – was sending him £400 from the family business, and Constable meant to invest half of this in government funds in Maria’s name. Back at his easel in Charlotte Street he felt that ‘after 20 years hard uphill work’ he had at last ‘got the publick into my hands – and want not a patron’. Sir George Beaumont called in mid-September to look at his new paintings and tried to put the clock back; Constable told Maria that Sir George still wanted him ‘to imitate pictures’. But Constable had commissions enough, including one to alter his small version of Salisbury Cathedral for the late Bishop’s daughter Mrs Elizabeth Mirehouse, a painting of Hampstead Heath for a Mr Ripley and a version of The Lock for James Carpenter. He needed Johnny Dunthorne on hand to help for several months. Johnny came willingly and this time was boarded out with a local handyman called Ambrose, originally from Suffolk; Constable apparently wanted to spare the shy country boy the dangers of proximity to his maid Elizabeth. Johnny was invaluable, cleaning pictures, running messages, putting portfolios in order and working on a model boat for Charley. While Constable painted one copy of Mr Morrison’s Lock, Johnny was at his side painting another copy. Johnny also helped with the outline of Waterloo Bridge, which was underway again, on and off, later in the year and which Constable hoped to have ready for the next show at Somerset House. Stothard, unlike Sir George a critic Constable listened to, came to see it and suggested an alteration of some sort that Constable called ‘very capital’.
By the end of 1825 the commissioned works in progress amounted to £400 and Constable told Fisher ‘four months will do them – God will help those who help themselves’. Self-help was again necessary because his French connections had gone awry. In mid-November Arrowsmith had turned up in Charlotte Street to find out about several pictures he had ordered from Constable; he had a friend in tow, an ‘amateur’. Both artist and dealer were on edge. Arrowsmith was having money problems. Constable had just heard from Tinney that he would not lend Stratford Mill for an exhibition in Edinburgh and this irked the painter. Now, Arrowsmith wanted quick delivery of the paintings he had commissioned. His friend, the dreaded amateur, stood by witnessing the scene, along with Johnny Dunthorne and his father who was in town visiting his son. According to Constable, in a letter to Fisher, the French dealer was ‘so excessively impertinent and used such language as never was used to me at my easil before’. Constable flew off the handle, startling Arrowsmith. The Frenchman backed down and apologised. Constable said he couldn’t accept an apology. Arrowsmith departed with his friend, telling Johnny Dunthorne that he would gladly have given a hundred pounds to have avoided this scene.
Constable then wrote to Arrowsmith formally withdrawing from their arrangements and sent a draft of £40 for the amount he owed the dealer. Arrowsmith replied acknowledging that he alone was the sufferer. Constable said he would forget the affair; he left it to Arrowsmith to order or not order any more pictures. However, Arrowsmith was on the slide – bankruptcy was in the offing – and there would be no more orders. Charles Schroth also went under in mid-1826, forced to unload paintings at knock-down prices. Fisher thought Constable had let his impetuousness and paranoia get the better of him. He wrote: ‘We are all given to torment ourselves with imaginary evils – but no man had ever this disease in such alarming paroxysms as yourself. You imagine difficulties where none exist, displeasure where none is felt, contempt where none is shown and neglect where none is meant.’ Fisher could see that Constable might have some cause in the Arrowsmith dispute, but ‘poor Tinney’ was merely trying to achieve the return of something that he had paid for. He ‘had rather see his picture on his own walls than hear of it in Edinburgh … He says you are a devilish odd fellow. For you get your bread by painting. – He orders two pictures[,] leaves the subjects to yourself; offers ready money & you declare off for no intelligible reason.’
Constable replied that Fisher’s letter had done him good, but he was evidently still sure of his own case:
It is easy for a bye stander like you to watch one struggling in the water and then say your difficulties are only imaginary. I have a great part to perform & you a much greater, but with only this difference. You are removed from the ills of life – you are almost placed beyond circumstances. My master the publick is hard, cruel, & unrelenting, making no allowance for a backsliding … Your own profession closes in and protects you, mine rejoices in the opportunity of ridding itself of a member who is sure to be in somebodys way or other.
I have related no imaginary ills to you – to one so deeply involved in active life as I am they are realities … I live by shadows, to me shadows are realities … I am so engaged that Johny [sic] and I cant give up. I am in for a winters campaign.
Constable said that Johnny ‘doated’ on him. The young man was ‘calm – gentle – clever – & industrious, full of prudence – & free from vice. He is greived at his master having so much of the devil about him.’ Constable was, however, cheered by a visit from the actor Jack Bannister, who wanted to commission a Constable landscape. Encountering the artist at his door as he let out two chimney sweeps, Bannister – never lost for a wisecrack – exclaimed, ‘What – brother brush!’8
He was off to Brighton over the Christmas season to be with Maria and the children. On New Year’s Day he walked down to the beach and sat painting an oil sketch of the Channel, noting on the back of the picture: ‘From 12 till 2 p.m. Fresh breeze from S.S.W.’ He also painted Perne’s Mill, at Gillingham, Dorset, which a local woman had been requesting since the summer of 1824. While he was at his easel Maria read aloud from Nicolas Poussin’s letters, recently redis-covered and published in Paris. Maria was amused to find that painters then and now had much in common: ‘The letters are apologies to friends for not doing their pictures sooner – anxieties of all kinds, insults – from ignorance.’
It was very cold when he got back to London on 12 January. The Thames was frozen over; his pictures, returned from Lille, were stuck on a ship moored in the river. His sister Mary sent some fowls from Flatford and Constable told Maria he would send them on to her in Brighton – they would keep in this weather. Another gold medal had been awarded to him in Lille and the painter of The White Horse was lauded in the prefect’s discourse. Constable tried to make things right with Fisher, the absentee owner, by telling him, ‘All things considered, the gold medal should be yours.’ Fisher was probably more pleased to hear that his picture was in perfect shape, ‘without a speck of injury’. But then Constable, unlike some of his famous contemporaries, was technically an extremely sound painter whose works stood up to time.9 (Dunthorne Senior’s early practice with him must have helped.) Although he had told Fisher six weeks before that Waterloo Bridge would be ‘done for the next exhibition’, and shortly thereafter this said it was sticking to him ‘like a blister’ and disturbing his sleep, he had to drop the painting from his campaign. He needed to get on with pictures that might produce more immediate profit.
Sir Thomas Lawrence, the President of the Academy, came in January to look at his works and, standing before the Waterloo Bridge, pleased Constable by saying he had never admired his pictures so much. This compliment evaporated quickly; when the Academy elections took place on 10 February, Constable again got very few votes. A consolation was that his younger friend Charles Leslie took one of the two seats for painters and became a full Academician. But Constable was used to disappointment in regard to Somerset House, and as always ploughed on. Once more he heeded his own atavistic affections, and Farington’s ideas of how he should find popularity, with a large upright of his old local scenery. Waterloo Bridge was put aside (he claimed he did this partly because of ‘the ruined state of my finances’). At the beginning of March his Brighton friend Henry Phillips, the botanist, provided some natural history for the new picture: ‘I think it is July in your green lane. At this season all the tall grasses are in flower, bogrush, bullrush, teasel. The white bindweed now hangs in flowers over the branches of the hedge; the wild carrot and hemlock flower in banks of hedges, cow parsley, water plantain, &c.; … bramble is now in flower, poppy, mallow, thistle, hop, &c..’ What was to be The Cornfield slowly came into existence, absorbing him completely. He told Fisher on 8 April, ‘I could think of and speak to no one. I was like a friend of mine in the battle of Waterloo – he said he dared not turn his head to the right or left – but always kept it straight forward – thinking of himself alone.’ The painting was roughly the size of The Lock, though ‘a subject of a very different nature – inland – cornfields – a close lane, kind of thing – but it is not neglected in any part. The trees are more than usually studied and the extremities well defined – as well as their species – they are shaken by a pleasant and healthfull breeze.’ And he quoted, more or less, from Thomson’s The Seasons: ‘while now a fresher gale, sweeping with shadowy gust the feilds of corn &c., &c.’10
The lane was Fen Lane. He had walked or run down it as a boy – the quickest way from East Bergholt to the river. He had sketches for it at hand, and pictures of it in his head. Whether he himself had ever lain prone on the dry summer ground and drunk from the cool spring, who knows? The boy doing so in the painting, while his dog paused, was perhaps a sentimental touch but he couldn’t resist it; for a while he called the picture ‘The Drinking Boy’.11 The boy has taken off his hat to drink. He has a blue kerchief tied around his neck and wears a red waistcoat. He looks like a slightly younger version of the youth on The Leaping Horse. When he sent the painting to Somerset House it was entitled, in his usual way, Landscape and became Landscape: Noon for the British Institution (but people took to calling it The Cornfield, and that it became after 1838). Constable confessed to Fisher his hopes of selling it: ‘It has certainly got a little more eye-salve than I usually condescend to give to them.’ (His son Charles Golding Constable later remarked that the little church in the distance never existed and was put there by ‘painter’s license’.)12 Constable worked at the Academy on at least one of the varnishing days. The sculptor Chantrey was as always prowling around and, noticing the dark shadows under the tails of the sheep, said in his usual jokey way, ‘Why Constable, all your sheep have got the rot – give me the palette – I must cure them.’ Chantrey’s efforts made matters worse; he threw the palette rag at Constable and departed.13 Constable himself remained in a good humour; he thought the exhibition that year was ‘delightful’. He told Fisher, ‘Turner never gave me so much pleasure – and so much pain – before.’ Turner was showing four works, including the impressive Forum Romanum painted for Sir John Soane. His pain-provoking problem, according to the critics, was too much yellow. About this Constable noted generously, ‘But every man who distinguishes himself in a great way, is on a precipice.’
The Cornfield was admired. Although it didn’t find a purchaser then and there, it opened the gate through which a great number of people were to pass into Constable’s country. The Times liked his Gillingham Mill as well, but thought The Cornfield ‘singularly beautiful, and not inferior to some of Hobbema’s most admired works’. Robert Hunt in The Examiner said, ‘Mr Constable is not so potent a genius [as Turner]; but in the rural walk in which he has moved, he is one of the most natural Painters of his time … He has been faithful to his first love, Nature, from the commencement of his career. He is a chaste Painter, and goes hand in hand with her alone …’ In 1850 Thackeray talked of The Cornfield as a piece which seemed to be ‘under the influence of a late shower; the shrubs, trees and distance are saturated with it … One cannot but admire the manner in which the specific character of every object is made out: the undulations of the ripe corn, the chequered light on the road; the freshness of the banks, the trees and their leafage, the brilliant clouds artfully contrasted against the trees, and here and there broken by azure.’14 As noted, corn was the term at the time for any cereal crop, but this looks like wheat, a thick golden carpet on the slope of the field, framed by trees and hedges and the river meadow beyond. The open gate reveals the lush crop growing nearly to the height of the gateposts.
The radiant field was a symbol of peace and fertility, an image of what fed people. But it was also a painting of money in the bank. Since Charles II’s reign, for well over a century, the import of corn had been restricted, with bounties to encourage exports, and this had made for good times for farmers, landowners and grain dealers such as Abram. The long war with France caused further restrictions. The price of wheat rose 300 per cent in twenty years, and the poor, who depended largely on bread, suffered greatly. When peace came in 1815 corn prices began to fall, so more laws were introduced to keep out imports, prop up prices and restore the incomes of the ‘landed interest’. This happened despite the complaints of consumers, particularly poor country folk, and the vehement opposition of townspeople, high and low.15
Constable was in East Bergholt unexpectedly in April. His sister Mary had written to say that Abram was very ill – would he come down? Mr Travis had called and found the patient in a profuse perspiration and eating nothing, though with a clear mind. Abram’s staff had rallied round and Mary added the news which had much cheered Abram: ‘Flour rose 5d. per sack to day which he likes to hear rather than the reverse.’ In the village Constable spent three days with his brother and sister at Flatford Mill, and this gave him time to walk the river banks and along Fen Lane. On his return to town he wrote to Fisher that he had lately been in Suffolk and ‘had some delightfull walks in the same fields’. Abram seemed better when Constable left East Bergholt, but he then had a week’s relapse with chills and fever. Later, in the autumn, he wrote to thank John for having cheered him up in his illness: ‘for sure I am you must have anxiety & care enough of your own, but your own vigour of intellect & energy of body has hitherto, aided by the Divine blessing, carried you through.’ Hitherto, and for a while yet.