16. English Landscape (1830–32)

THE LETTER TO Fisher of May 1830 went on to announce a Constable event. He told his old friend that he had a little book about to start coming out called Various Subjects of Landscape, characteristic of English Scenery; there would be four prints in each part, and it promised well. It was to be his summing-up. What it didn’t promise – although he didn’t know this yet – was an easy time for his health, finances and happiness.

English Landscape was a new experience for Constable, whose works had not been successfully reproduced at this point. It was a series of mezzotints, a form of engraving, invented in the seventeenth century, that became popular in the eighteenth when it was used to reproduce portraits painted by Gainsborough and Reynolds. The metal plate was chiselled into a blurred mesh of dots and this, when covered with ink, would produce a solid black printed image. The engraver then scraped off areas of the burr or burnished the plate smooth in the parts where he wanted half-tones and lights to create the picture he had in mind. The engraver Constable picked for his project was a twenty-seven-year-old craftsman named David Lucas.¹ Lucas’s background was even more rural than Constable’s – his father was a working farmer and grazier in Northamptonshire – but Lucas had been apprenticed to a leading engraver, Samuel William Reynolds. Reynolds had begun, but not finished, an engraving of Constable’s Lock, of 1824, and he had also been asked by John Arrowsmith to make prints of some of Constable’s Brighton drawings – another abandoned project. Lucas was living on the Harrow Road, Paddington.² Constable had written to him in August 1829 when sending – so it seems – sketches for proposed plates. As the letter to Fisher of May 1830 demonstrates, the project was properly under way by the following spring.

In 1822 Fisher had recommended that Constable build up his reputation by lithographs. Constable’s drawings always impressed people, Fisher said; therefore, ‘Get one done on stone as an experiment.’ Fisher wasn’t keen on mezzotint, whose stubbly process he thought unsuited to Constable’s ‘evanescent effects’ – ‘Your charm is colour, and the cool tint of English daylight.’ But his enthusiasm for the idea of Constable reproductions got to the artist. Fame of course was a spur, and other artists had found engraving a way of making a record of their works. Claude was the great inspiration, with his Liber Veritatis. Turner’s Liber Studiorum was a more up-to-date exemplar – and Constable must have recognised the value of the book of engravings as an advertising tool, useful in disseminating Turner’s work to a wider field. Constable could do with such an audience. Popularity, he kept claiming, was never going to be his, but this didn’t stop him hankering after acceptance by his peers and greater recognition as a landscape painter. Did he know Hazlitt’s essay ‘Immortality in Youth’? – ‘It is the simplicity and, as it were, abstractedness of our feelings in youth that (so to speak) identifies us with Nature and (our experience being weak and our passions strong) makes us fancy ourselves immortal like it.’³ In the introduction Constable wrote for his book of mezzotints, he set those artists who had eyes only for ‘what others have accomplished’ against those who went to the primitive source, Nature, and added to Art qualities of Nature unknown to it before. They ‘thus formed a style which was original’. The first type of artist merely repeated the work of others, and was easily comprehended and welcomed. But ‘the rise of an Artist in a sphere of his own must almost certainly be delayed; it is to time generally that the justness of his claims to a lasting reputation will be left’. He intended to display the variety of nature and show how the landscape of England looked at various seasons, at various times of day.⁴

The effort of bringing forth English Landscape strained both artist and engraver. Constable wrote to Lucas in March 1831:

I have thought much on my book, and all my reflections on the subject go to oppress me – its duration, its expence, its hopelessness of remuneration, all are unfavourable … The expence is too enormous for a work that has nothing but your beautiful feeling and execution to recommend it – the painter himself is totally unpopular and ever will be, on this side of the grave certainly … Remember dear Lucas that I mean not to think one reflection on you – every thing with the plan is my own – and I want to releive my mind of that which now harrasses it like a disease.

Nearly a year later Constable told Lucas:

I am so sadly grieved at the proof you now send me of the Castle [Hadleigh, that is] that I am most anxious to see you. Your art may have resources of which I know nothing – but so deplorably deficient in all feeling is the present state of the plate that I can suggest nothing at all – to me it is utterly, utterly HOPELESS.’⁵

Lucas found it hard to measure up to Constable’s standards. He thought Constable sometimes charged him with failures he didn’t deserve. He told the painter, ‘You seem to think I stick at nothing where my own interest is concerned, but I have made not a few sacrifices rather than act in a way that I anticipated would be disagreable [sic] to you.’ But compared with the maker of the Liber Studiorum, who did much of his own initial etching of the plates and then had frequent rows with his engravers, Constable was patient and friendly. Both he and Lucas were often unwell during this period. Both were made anxious by sick children. Constable was aware that he kept changing his mind about which subjects to have engraved and how the prints should be composed, and he demanded reworkings from Lucas that were often counter-productive – the final states were much worse than the earliest.⁶

Yet despite all this Lucas found Constable a stalwart companion in their ‘joint labours’. Between giving directions and then changing directions for printing the sets, Constable frequently expressed concern for Lucas and his family. When Lucas’s little boy was very sick, Constable asked Dr Davis (who also attended Constable and his son John Charles) to visit the Lucases. On 4 January 1831 he sent Holland, the man who often carried messages for him, to find out from Lucas how things were with the boy: ‘I feel for your distress, and I trust you have seen Dr Davis – for if human means can avail they are his. Don’t think of me and my concern for a moment … I mention this only to releive your mind from all other anxiety, as I well know your great integrity, and that you are always too ready to devote yourself to others, or at least to me.’ Ultimately Constable gave Lucas his support when he tried for election as an Associate of the Academy and told him they had ‘a bond of friendship’ brought about by ‘the lovely amalgamation’ of their works. Lucas was to remember instances when Constable reminded him of their common rural backgrounds. On one occasion in July 1830 Constable made a sketch for him showing the way English river valleys ran to the sea and in particular ‘that which divides the counties of Essex and Suffolk’.⁷

Letters between painter and engraver tracked the uneven progress of the work. On 26 February 1830, for example, Constable chivvied Lucas – often in homely figures of speech – about the plates he was working on. ‘I want to know how forward the “Evening” is and the retouched “Stoke”,’ he wrote. And: ‘I have taken much pains with the last proof of the “Summerland”, but I fear I shall be obliged to reject it. It has never recovered from its first trip up, and the sky with the new ground is and ever will be as rotten as cow dung.’ And: ‘I like your first plates, for they are by far (very far) the best, but I allow much for your distractions since, with these devils the printers – and your finances, and other matters, not in unison with that patient toil, which ought always to govern the habits of us both – but more perhaps yours …’ And: ‘Bring me another “Castle” or two or three, for it is mighty fine – though it looks as if all the chimney sweepers in Christendom had been at work on it, & thrown their soot bags up in the air. Yet everybody likes it – but I should recollect that no one but the elect see my things – I have no doubt the world despises them … Come early tomorrow evening, and bring what you can – & an account of the state of the next – I am nervous, & anxious about them …’

Sometimes Lucas got it wrong and aroused the painter’s anger. After Lucas altered a ‘Glebe Farm’ plate without being asked to, and sent Constable a proof, Constable wrote in anguish to him, ‘I frankly tell you I could burst into tears – never was there such a wreck. Do not touch the plate again on any account … I could cry for my poor wretched wreck of the Glebe Farm.’ In one undated blast, at what was clearly a nervous moment (probably in 1833), Constable complained to Lucas, ‘This dreadfull book must be my ruin … You do nothing right – not one thing that you say you will … It was the devil himself who first led me step by step to do it – thus to waste the sacred property of my children’ – in other words Mr Bicknell’s legacy. An apology to Lucas soon followed.⁸

Constable at first intended English Landscape to be eight plates in two parts each of four. Lucas was paid £15 and later £17 per plate. But Constable kept changing his mind about the subjects to be engraved and which plate should be in what part. Lucas was kept to the mark with admonitions about, say, the windmills. Constable was keen not to be added to the roster of ‘uninformed artists’ who created sails ‘that no amount of wind would be able to turn round’. Constable went to visit Lucas now and then, tried out his printing press, and made drawings to show him how a windmill functioned.⁹ However, the project went on growing like Topsy. In the initial series of 1830 to 1832 five parts or ‘numbers’ were printed, four of which had four prints and one six prints (several hundred impressions were apparently taken from each plate). A sixth part was contemplated but instead of this a further, differently arranged set of parts replaced the first, with an expanded title, an introduction and notes. Despite Constable’s letter to Fisher of 24 May 1830 promising the first number the following week, publication was delayed until early July. Copies could be bought from 34 Charlotte Street and from the Colnaghis in Pall Mall East, though like Turner Constable resented the commissions taken by print dealers (the ‘sharks’, as he called them).¹⁰

A copy of the first number received a hospitable review from the Athenaeum. The subjects were more varied than expected from Mr Constable, ‘who appears to have fed his genius, like a tethered horse, within a small circle in the homestead’. The Spectator faulted the ‘extreme blackness and coarseness’ of the engravings, while admitting that they displayed great feeling. Constable also presented copies to Peter de Wint, the landscape painter, who was grateful; to John Britton, antiquarian and topographical draughtsman, who like The Spectator thought the prints too black; and to James and William Carpenter, the father-and-son booksellers in Bond Street. Constable generally dealt with the son, in the hope that he would promote the work through the shop, rather than the father, with whom he had had his problems – not uncommon with those who bought or thought they had bought one of Constable’s pictures and then found Constable hanging on to it, and allegedly improving it. James Carpenter went through this with A Boat Passing a Lock, exhibited at the Academy in 1829, and, not managing to acquire it, eventually agreed to accept a new Constable painting of the same size, for which he put up a deposit of one hundred guineas. Constable told Carpenter that Helmingham Dell – which he occasionally referred to as ‘A Wood’ – would be his but changed his mind just before he sent it to the Academy in 1830; he decided to keep it, forfeiting Carpenter’s friendship and having to pay back the hundred guineas. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t painted the same scene several times, with a rather rickety bridge spanning a stream running towards the viewer through a dark, tree-shaded declivity, though this time there were deer, a cow, and a few small human figures that increased the sense of melancholy. Constable had no other purchaser lined up; he simply wanted to keep the painting.¹¹

The ‘Wood’ figured in mezzotint-form in English Landscape; it was a spot to which he had been attached, as were most of the subjects in his ‘book’. Others were East Bergholt common and its windmill for a plate named Spring; a view of West End Fields, Hampstead, entitled Noon; the shore at Brighton in surf and wind, A Sea Beach; and also Weymouth Bay, Hadleigh Castle, several Stour valley scenes and – a little more removed but meaningful to him – Old Sarum and the entrance to Yarmouth harbour. The frontispiece, which he and Lucas got around to in 1831 for the fifth part, showed the front of his parents’ house and its grounds, with a man sketching, his dog nearby. The Latin epigraph below the title of East Bergholt, Suffolk was that translated in 1820 by John Fisher and his brother-in-law Christopher Cookson:

Brighton: a sea beach

This spot saw the day spring of my life,

Hours of Joy, and years of Happiness.

This place first tinged my boyish fancy with a love of the art,

This place was the origin of my Fame.¹²

What some like The Spectator saw as Constable’s extreme blackness or his fondness for the soot bucket was explained in his introduction. It was intended. He was seeking chiaroscuro as a main effect, and mezzotint was the technique best suited for this. The Italian term was briefly alluded to in the first series; in the second, in 1833, it was heralded in the subtitle, where the work being offered was said to be ‘Principally Intended to Mark the Phenomena of the Chiar’Oscuro of Nature’. In a later lecture he defined chiaroscuro as ‘that power which creates space; we find it everywhere and at all times in nature; opposition, union, light, shade, reflection, and refraction, all contribute to it’.¹³ But it wasn’t just an artistic means of creating space and bringing a picture to life; it was a natural thing, the ‘medium by which the grand and varied aspects of landscape are displayed, both in the fields and on canvass’ [sic]. Light and shadow were what counted, and the way these elements were balanced in a painting was all-important. Constable wanted his prints to direct the viewer’s attention to this. Because mezzotint’s rich blackness mimicked his own dark clouds (and possibly expressed his own black depressions), it was a suitable medium for him, particularly in the hands of David Lucas. In many of the most successful plates, Lucas got across the effects of Constable’s broad and heavily paint-loaded brushwork. By vivid contrast and suggestive gradation, he caught Constable’s solemnity and melancholy and the moments of glorious illumination. The antithetical elements, the light and the dark, were brought home by Lucas to the man who painted the original pictures. In 1834 Constable told Lucas, after being moved by the prints Lucas had made of The Lock and The Cornfield, ‘Now … is every bit of sunshine clouded over in me. I can never now look at these two flattering testimonies of the result of my singularly marked life … without the most painful emotions.’¹⁴ Mezzotint was right for the way he felt post-Maria: black-and-white emotions; darkness visible.

The descriptions that Constable wrote for some of the plates attempted to convey important matters, but the effort sometimes came across as stilted rather than spontaneous. For example, the plodding commentary for Stoke-by-Nayland: ‘The solemn stillness of Nature in a Summer’s Noon, when attended by thunder-clouds, is the sentiment attempted in this print; at the same time, an endeavour has been made to give an additional interest … by the introduction of the Rainbow.’ Nature exhibited ‘no feature more lovely nor any that awaken a more soothing reflection than the Rainbow’. He went on to analyse the phenomenon at length. He made a number of sketches and diagrams of rainbows; they seemed to be symbols of the hope he now sought. Other mementoes included a flight of rooks in a sunset at East Bergholt, the birds introduced possibly because he recalled an occasion at Osmington when a rook’s cawing accompanied a walk with Fisher – and the rooks gave Lucas trouble, looking as they did like blemishes on the plate. Constable’s printed prospectus for his book declared his desire ‘to increase the interest for, and promote the study of, the rural scenery of England, with all its endearing associations, and even in its most simple localities; England with her climate of more than vernal freshness …’¹⁵ And so on. He took an epigraph from Cicero: ‘how much painters see in shade and protrusions that we do not see’. And he went frequently to his favourite poets – Shakespeare, Milton, Thomson, Akenside and Wordsworth – for helpful associations.¹⁶

If some of the attached writing was inflated, the twenty-two mezzotint prints engraved by Lucas served Constable’s purpose. They showed rural England at its most winning time, a landscape shaped by use and craft, with hedges, copses, crops, locks, watermills and windmills, beach groins and harbour jetties, farmhouses and Norman churches. At one point he meant to dedicate English Landscape to John Fisher. Leslie later found in one of Constable’s sketchbooks a draft of such a dedication:

I know not if the landscapes I now offer to your notice will add to the esteem in which you have always been so kind as to hold me as a painter; I shall dedicate them to you, relying on that affection which you have invariably extended to me under every circumstance.

But, perhaps because Constable backed into the project in an irregular fashion, with the frontispiece appearing in 1831, a year after the first prints were made, and the letterpress commentaries two years after that, a dedication never appeared. Although Lucas produced more than four thousand prints, not many were sold. The Colnaghis got rid of a few and some individual buyers appeared, such as Lord Dover, who sent ten guineas for copies of the fifth number. Constable gave away a good many. At one point he added a ruin to the painting of the Glebe Farm he had sent to Lucas for transcription into mezzotint, saying ‘not to have a symbol in the book of myself, and of the “Work” which I have projected, would be missing the opportunity’. In 1832 numerous letters to Lucas from the painter expressed Constable’s sense of ruination over English Landscape. The printer they were using for the letterpress, W.J. Sparrow, had been causing trouble. Sparrow was in love, waxing poetic, and his marriage plans got in the way of the humdrum work of printing. In June 1832 he sent Constable a large slice of wedding cake when the artist was impatient for proofs.¹⁷ Gloom was piled on blackness heaped on gloom. Leslie put it well when he wrote that English Landscape ultimately proved to be, ‘as Coleridge said of a work of his own, “a secret confided to the public, and very faithfully kept” ’.¹⁸