Old Sarum
IN LATE DECEMBER 1833 Constable was again taken sick in Hampstead. Unable to leave Well Walk, he wrote in January to Leslie in America to say how ill and depressed he had been since Leslie departed from England. But worse was to come. He spent most of February and March in bed. His doctor, Herbert Evans, wrote to their mutual friend William Purton, one of several amateur painters Constable became friends with, to say it was a severe attack of rheumatic fever: ‘In the early part of this period the suffering was very great; all the joints became the seat of the diseases two or three times over, and the pain and fever were of the most aggravated kind. These sufferings he bore with great patience for one of so sensitive a frame.’ Constable generally cheered up when Evans made one of his twice-a-day visits. But Evans said, ‘I think he was never so well after this severe illness; its effects were felt by him, and showed themselves in his looks ever afterwards.’1
There was a family history of this illness, too. Constable had had what he described to Leslie as an acute attack of rheumatism in December 1831 and his son John seems also to have had rheumatic fever during the 1833 Christmas holidays. Fortunately the devoted young Boner looked after Constable, ran errands, took dictation, and sat up all night in attendance.2 Rheumatic fever can affect not only the joints but the skin and central nervous system. It produces symptoms like arthritis: swollen joints, making the wrists, elbows, ankles and knees hot and painful. Nodules and protuberances may form, and rashes appear. Sometimes the muscles jerk involuntarily. Most seriously, the heart can be inflamed and damaged. In Constable’s case, painting was impossible, and for him this must have been as painful as the illness. His sister Mary had her own ideas for alleviating his symptoms: warm seabathing, avoiding cheese and very hot coffee, drinking camomile tea, walking in the sunshine and fretting at nothing.3
When it came time for the Academy exhibition, he had only three watercolours and a pencil drawing to submit. The Spectator noted: ‘The exhibition is not rich in Landscape this year; which makes us miss Constable the more: he spoils better landscapes than many can paint.’4 One of the watercolours was Old Sarum from the south – very grey green and a sky frothing with rain clouds, with what looks like a downpour beginning on the right and, the motif he had used in Hadleigh Castle, a shepherd with his crook and a dog chivvying a flock of sheep along the sloping hillside; the giant mound, a seemingly inevitable shape, dominates the centre of the picture.5
Old Sarum
He was unable to go down to Suffolk for a promised spring visit or call in Colchester on the Masons, his cousin Anne and her husband, as he had intended. In June his spirits weren’t lifted when a Landscape with Figures of his was bought in at Christie’s at fifty guineas; at least Mr Christie ensured it wasn’t knocked down for fifty shillings.6 He was better enough to travel to Sussex in early July, joining young John at George Constable’s. His host won young John’s heart with the gift of ‘an electrifying machine’, whose arrival in Charlotte Street Constable dreaded. He was thinking about another big painting, ‘either a canal or a rural affair’, he told George Constable,7 and the fresh landscape of West Sussex was saluted in a letter to Leslie:
The chalk cliffs afford John many fragments of oyster shells and other matters that fell from the table of Adam in all probability … The castle is the cheif ornament of this place – but all here sinks to insignificance in comparison with the woods, and hills. The woods hang from excessive steeps, and precipices, and the trees are beyond everything beautifull: I never saw such beauty in natural landscape before. I wish it may influence what I may do in future, for I have too much preferred the picturesque to the beautiful – which will I hope account for the broken ruggedness of my style.
If the southern ‘hangers’ were new to him, the succulent meadows along the Arun River were similar to those beside the Stour. Constable collected samples of the rich-coloured sand and soil of Fittleworth common to take back to Charlotte Street. He told George Constable he’d like bits of the slimy posts he’d seen near an old mill – would the brewer cut them off and send them to him?8
He also visited Petworth House. Lord Egremont, the great collector, asked him to stay for a few days, and Constable said he would when Leslie was there. Looking at the art there, Constable came across a Gainsborough awaiting hanging. He wrote to Leslie, ‘I placed it as it suited me – & I now, even now think of it with tears in my eyes. No feeling of landscape ever equalled it. With particulars he had nothing to do, his object was to deliver a fine sentiment – & he has fully accomplished it.’ Leslie often spent part of the autumn with his family at the ‘house of art’, as Constable called it. After some dithering about the Earl’s invitation, Constable finally – encouraged by Leslie – took it up. As painter and patron John Constable and Lord Egremont might have been thought meant for each other. But Constable had earlier got into one of his awkward moods and decided that Lord Egremont wasn’t fond of landscape painting. In 1824 the Earl had seen some of Constable’s work being painted for Arrowsmith, and, Constable told Fisher, ‘He recollected all my pictures of any note, but he recollected them only for their defects … The truth is landscape affords him no interest whatever.’ (A comment that might have made Turner smile.) However, by 1834 the noble Lord’s generosity to artists – Turner and Leslie included – seems to have swayed Constable, and on 30 August he told a rather infirm Lady Dysart with some pride that he was going down to Petworth for a few days. Leslie, there already, continued to recommend the attractions of the house: ‘Today forty people dine here, most of them magistrates, and the house is as full as it can hold. Among them is the Duke of Richmond. I have just been looking at the table as it is set out in the Carved Room, covered with magnificent gold and silver plate.’
Chantrey and Thomas Phillips, the portrait painter who was one of Lord Egremont’s favourites, were among the guests Constable found at Petworth. The Phillipses and Leslie took him to Cowdray Park to see the ruins of the castle, and Constable sketched.9 He stayed not ‘a few days’ but a fortnight. The hospitable Earl arranged for a carriage to be at Constable’s disposal for trips in the locality. Constable went with Leslie to sketch an old farmstead known as Wicked Hammond’s House. A woman living in the former home of the alleged villain told them that some bones had recently been found in the well that a local doctor said were ‘the arm bones of a Christian’. Leslie sketched the interior, Constable (as one might have expected) the outside, with its tall chimneys. Leslie observed his friend’s daily habits: ‘He rose early and had often made some beautiful sketch in the park before breakfast. On going into his room one morning … I found him setting some of these sketches with isinglass. His dressing table was covered with flowers, feathers of birds, and pieces of bark with lichens and mosses adhering to them, which he had brought home for the sake of their beautiful tints.’10
Lord Egremont had also invited Turner, but the Earl told Constable that Turner was unable to come. ‘He was off to the North on a bookseller’s job, that was a profound secret.’11 Lord Egremont may have thought it would be instructive and amusing to throw the two landscape painters together, the celebrated and the less so, chalk and cheese. Or as Mary, one of Charles Leslie’s children, once noted in a handwritten so-called ‘lecture’, ‘The too [sic] most oposite modern painters, namely Constable and Turner, painted two metals much alike, Constable painted silver, Turner painted gold. That is the remark I heard pappa say when compareing a Constable with a Turner.’12
Turner’s one-year seniority in birth (and twenty-seven-year seniority as an Academician) gave him plenty of scope he might have assumed anyway to act superior to Constable. Young Robert Leslie, then about eight, encountered Turner later that September at Petworth, presumably just back from his northern journey, down by the lake in the park – one of Turner’s favourite haunts. He had just caught a large pike. Robert had with him a toy sailing ship, a flat piece of board his father had cut out and which Constable had rigged for him with sticks for masts. When he heard the name Constable, Turner muttered crossly, ‘Oh, he don’t know anything about ships. This is how to do it.’ Tearing some pages from his sketchbook he made some paper sails for the craft that struck Robert as really shipshape. Constable was never the owner of his own sailing boat, the way Turner was, but from his life on the Stour, his knowledge of his father’s barges and coasting vessels, his voyage on the Coutts, and his observations from the beach at Brighton and Weymouth, he certainly knew about the sea and sailing vessels – pulled up on the shingle, rolling at anchor, or running before a Channel breeze. He drew or painted them as well as any man – except possibly the great competitor. (Turner, it may be noted, as if not to be outdone produced a Brighton Chain Pier a year after Constable’s.) Robert Leslie wrote later, ‘Though I think Constable never loved the sea, he was always at home with his pencil among shipping and boats. And I remember a simple but valuable lesson of his to me upon the first principle in drawing the hull of a man-of-war. “Always think of it,” he said, “and draw it first as a floating cask or barrel – and upon this foundation build up your ship, masts, and rigging.” As he said this, he rapidly evolved a stern view of a line of battleship upon the sketch of a half-immersed cask.’13
During his Petworth stay Constable filled a large sketchbook with drawings, some highly finished. Two were pale watercolours, one of the great house from across the lake, the other of the rolling parkland and downs with Chanctonbury Ring in the eastern distance – fawn, light green, blues, barely coloured. How Constable got on with the motley company in what some referred to as ‘Liberty Hall’ – the Earl’s wife, mistresses, children, distinguished guests, and sundry artists and their families – is not known. The length of his stay suggests that he got over his pre-visit nerves and feelings of reluctance and awkwardness but was then glad to get home to his chicks. He never went to Petworth again. And Lord Egremont, already in old age, never bought a Constable painting.14
Constable and Turner were both on hand in London on the evening of 16 October 1834 when the Houses of Parliament caught fire. They were among a number of Royal Academicians drawn to the spectacle. Wooden tallies once used as exchequer receipts were being burned in the furnaces of the House of Lords and the heat in the chimneys ignited structural timbers. A greater part of the medieval palace of Westminster was devoured by flames. Turner made sketches first from a boat on the river that he shared with Stanfield and some RA students, then from the Surrey bank opposite. Constable brought his two oldest sons in a hackney coach and got the driver to park it on Westminster Bridge so they could watch the inferno. Fire, heat and flame were very much in Turner’s line; the river, and river water used by the firemen for their pumps, more in Constable’s – and young John Charles as a youthful fire-engine enthusiast would have been excited. Soldiers were brought in to reinforce the police attempting to control the gawping crowds. The correspondent of the Gentleman’s Magazine noted that when the roof of the House of Lords fell in, the spectators ‘involuntarily (and from no bad feeling) clapped their hands’.15 Constable may have felt that divine intervention had struck the newly Reformed Parliament. Early the next year he wrote delightedly to his son Charles after attending the election in Suffolk for the House of Commons: ‘People are truly sick of the Whigs. The Tories are the best people, the Whigs next best – but as the Whigs always join the Radicals, we are not safe in their hands.’16 Two weeks after the fire, he described it to Charles Leslie. As he did so, Leslie said later, ‘he drew with a pen, on half a sheet of letter paper, Westminster Hall as it showed itself during the conflagration; blotting the light and shade with ink, which he rubbed with his finger where he wished it to be lightest. He then, on another half sheet, added the towers of the Abbey and that of St Margaret’s Church – and the papers, being joined, form a very grand sketch of the whole scene.’ Inky fingers were an unavoidable by-product of art.17
Towards Christmas the black dog gripped him again. He begged off a visit he planned with Leslie to see their colleague Gilbert Stuart Newton, whose mind was gravely unhinged. Newton – born in Nova Scotia and raised in Boston – had told Leslie as a matter of fact that the seventeenth-century Lord Strafford was still with them – he had escaped death on the scaffold and was, to boot, the same person as Lorenzo de Medici. (The number of artists who cracked up perhaps only seemed greater than average.) Constable’s depression wasn’t helped by trouble he was having with Alaric Watts, editor of the Literary Souvenir. Constable had been invited to write an essay for this annual, and Watts had so chopped up his material that the painter refused to let it appear. He was also having an altercation with David Lucas. He told Leslie that he was only kept going by work: ‘My canvas soothes me into a forgetfulness of the scene of turmoil and folly – and worse – of the scene around me.’ He seemed cross about and almost jealous of the engravings Lucas had done of The Lock and The Cornfield; they made him feel, perversely, that his creations, and he along with them, were being sold to ‘low publishers’; and consequently he no longer felt the gratification of his own work. ‘The two beautiful prints by Lucas are in the windows [of the print sellers], but every gleam of sunshine is blighted to me in the art at least. Can it therefore be wondered at that I paint continual storms? “Tempest o’er tempest rolled” – still the “darkness” is majestic …’
Nevertheless, he sent notes to Lucas by way of Boner, apologising for his ‘impetuosity’, and Lucas kept his temper – or at least kept silent – when, despite having apologised, Constable once again went off the deep end. (Lucas took a modest revenge every now and then by requesting the loan of a pound or so.) Constable’s state of mind indeed seemed blighted by his participation in what he called the ‘dreadful book’ with its ‘worthless & bad proofs’ which Lucas sent him. He had been here before, as he had made clear in a paranoiac memorandum to Lucas giving all the reasons he should never have gone down the profitless path of print publishing:
This screed continued, without further numbering, for some twenty more lines to do with the hopelessness of making money from printmaking and print-selling. His feelings about English Landscape had been summed up in a note to Lucas in late June 1833: ‘The whole work is a dismal blank to me, and a total failure & loss.’18
However – and there was generally a however with Constable – he had bounced back enough to make improvements to his ‘book’. Early in 1834, before the rheumatic fever really hit him, he wrote to Leslie at West Point that he was making ‘a flyleaf for each of my prints’, a page of historical and topographical information about each subject ‘with Poetical Allusions applicable to the scenery’. His reasoning was that ‘many can read print & cannot read mezzotint’. In fact he completed six such pieces: they dealt with the plates for East Bergholt, his birthplace and family home; Spring – the view of East Bergholt common; Stoke by Nayland, a picture of a thundery noon, with church and rainbow; another Noon, this one showing West End Fields at Hampstead; A Sea Beach, Brighton, with fishing boats and waves rolling in; and finally Old Sarum, the subject he said embodied the words, ‘Paint me a desolation.’
By the end of 1834 Constable had sold fewer than a hundred copies of his book of prints. (One buyer was General Rebow, of Wivenhoe Hall, who paid Constable seven guineas for a copy on India paper.) But when he blamed Lucas for the ensuing tribulations he soon regretted it. He explained to Lucas that he was ‘watchful & jealous’ of his own style but admired the engraver’s ‘mode of rendering that style’. He had no doubt of Lucas’s regard for him and his love for Constable’s ‘things in landscape’. And Constable went on, ‘There can be no greater proofs than the manner in which you have rendered them … at your own risk, and that of your family and reputation … We have a bond of friendship … that all do not possess – a unison of feeling in art.’ When Lucas was at work engraving Stratford Mill, Constable explained to him ‘the natural history of the painting’ – the way the changes in river level caused the roots of plants or trees to thrive or die (hence a dead tree on the right bank); the way the prevailing wind led the trees in the water meadows to lean in one direction.19
He encountered Lucas one day at an exhibition of Rembrandt drawings and thought of talking to him about how he should remain open to engraving portraits; but he realised that Lucas just then was in another world. Constable wrote to him next day, ‘You availed yourself of Rembrandt’s light and shadow, and were lost.’ When Lucas wanted to stand for election to the Academy in 1835, Constable supported him, but told Lucas to ‘remember that most of the Royal Academicians know as much of landscapes as they do of the Kingdom of Heaven’. And when Lucas lost to the engraver Samuel Cousins, who was well known for his work after Lawrence portraits, Constable consoled Lucas as well as he could on the four votes he had received. He knew how it felt.20