THE YEAR BEGAN fine and remarkably illness free. Constable went up to Suffolk to see his brothers and sisters and to vote.1 He wrote enthusiastically to Boner that ‘the Blues’, the Tories, had been triumphant in that locality. Moreover, ‘The birds are singing, the rooks busy, the meadows green, & the water & skies blue.’ (A few months later he expressed via Boner his anti-Radical thanks to the Almighty for removing ‘the restless spirit, old Cobbett’.) Boner wrote back to East Bergholt on 19 January to give him the London news, to hope his Suffolk stay did him good, and to say, ‘We are all well.’2 While he was out of town John Dunthorne Senior called and talked to Alfie. On getting back to Charlotte Street Constable wrote to Dunthorne asking if he could borrow several drawings that his son Johnny had made: one of some plants and two of ‘the ashes in the town meadow’. Constable explained, ‘I am about an ash or two now.’ He said he was sending his old friend care of Flatford two large mezzotints which Lucas had just engraved of The Lock and The Cornfield. Constable had told Lucas he had heard good things about the pair of prints; it was thought they would sell.3 But an early reaction from The Spectator gave with one hand and took with the other. The engravings were done ‘with great vigour and freedom, and in successful imitation of the painter’s peculiar manner’. Moreover, mezzotint wasn’t well suited to landscape and brought out Constable’s faults more strongly. It made ‘his cold, dark colours appear blacker, and his scattered lights whiter; thus exaggerating the raw tone of his later works’.4
The Spectator’s review is worth dwelling on because it gives a good idea of what Constable was up against now that his eccentricities were well known enough to be mocked. The writer agreed that Constable’s pictures had ‘the germ of a strong feeling for nature’, but this was hidden beneath an ‘unpleasing mannerism’. (Evidently his own ‘close and continual observance of nature’ hadn’t protected him from this.) The reviewer continued:
His early works are admirable for the sober truth and identity of their imitation of nature; and notwithstanding he scatters a shower of snow over every landscape he paints, he cannot entirely conceal the traces of merits that he seems determined to obliterate. We know he means these little spots of white to represent the glancing particles of light that are reflected on every glossy leaf in a bright sunshiny day, or after a clearing-shower; but all the world save only himself mistake it for a representation of snow, or meal scattered over the canvas.
The writer described the two scenes as faithfully and feelingly conveying the English countryside, but of the two he preferred The Lock for its more forceful effect. In the lane of The Cornfield, ‘the numerous little white lights produce a spottiness instead of a sparkling brilliancy, cutting up the general effect, and destroying the tone of the picture’. Moreover,
The shepherd-boy lying down to drink at the spring, instead of making us feel how welcome is the cold draught on a sultry day, causes us to shiver as if he were dipping his face in an iced pool … The glowing warmth of Turner’s paintings subsides into sober brilliancy in engravings; the crude and cold colouring of Constable translates into harsh blackness and whiteness.5
His only entry for the RA exhibition that year was The Valley Farm, a version of an old subject, much painted by him, Willy Lott’s house and the stream that ran past Flatford Mill. It was a large canvas, if not quite a six-footer. He worked on it through the winter and spring of 1835 and in the end didn’t use Johnny Dunthorne’s drawings but his own of a Hampstead ash, with added boughs. The prominent collector Robert Vernon (wealthy as a result of selling horses to the British Army) was happily spending some of his fortune on British paintings; in the last couple of years he had bought two Turners, The Bridge of Sighs and The Golden Bough. Vernon came to Charlotte Street in March and saw The Valley Farm on the easel. He asked Constable whether he had painted the picture for any particular person and Constable replied, ‘Yes, sir, it was painted for a very particular person for whom I have all my life painted.’ Vernon bought the painting then and there. Leslie may have had a hand in setting the price, for Constable was unsure what to ask. Turner’s standard price for a three-foot by four-foot canvas in the late 1830s was two hundred guineas. Vernon paid Constable three hundred pounds for The Valley Farm, more than the artist had ever got for a painting before.6
But Constable went on working on it. He wrote to George Constable a few weeks later to say happily, ‘I have got my picture into a very beautifull state. I have kept my brightness without my spottiness, and I have preserved God Almighty’s daylight, which is enjoyed by all mankind, excepting only the lovers of old dirty canvas, perished pictures at a thousand guineas each, cart grease, tar and snuff of candles …’7 It seems to have been at one of this year’s varnishing days that Constable encountered Clarkson Stanfield at work on a canvas and told him, ‘I like your picture very much.’ ‘Pooh,’ said Stanfield, ‘that won’t do, Mr Constable. I know what you say behind my back – you say of my pictures, they are all putty!’ ‘Well,’ admitted Constable, ‘well I did say so – but Mr Stanfield, I like putty.’8
The sale of The Valley Farm insulated Constable from some of the criticism the picture engendered. Although the Athenaeum declared that Constable, ‘an original in everything, … must be compared with nature, and not with art’, the Morning Post found that ‘neither in sunshine nor in shower did we ever see anything so speckled and spotty’. The Literary Gazette thought, a touch more kindly, that his habit of sprinkling flake-white over the wet surface of his pictures and thereby concealing their beauty was here only partially successful: ‘The truth and vigour of his work manifest themselves, notwithstanding all his insidious and suicidal effects to hide them.’ Abram with brotherly kindness wrote to say that he had seen The Valley Farm ‘well-mention’d’ in The News, but failed, tactfully, to pass on the news that the paper not only said the painting was ‘full of talent’ but that ‘the daubs of white give it a cold, wiry, chalky look – which a friend remarked set his teeth on edge’. The Spectator believed Constable preferred ‘his mannerism to his fame’. The Reverend John Eagles, the amateur artist and knockabout critic whose attack on Turner the following year inspired a seventeen-year-old John Ruskin to passionate defence of his hero, wrote in Blackwood’s: ‘There is nothing here to designate a valley nor a farm.’ Eagles saw ‘something like a cow standing in some ditch-water … Such conceited imbecility is distressing.’ As for the difficult Edward Dubois, in what seems to have been a final attack in the Observer on Constable as an artist who was wealthy enough to be eccentric, Dubois said that The Valley Farm excelled in chiaroscuro, and had more than usual of Constable’s reputed power. Yet this was by contrast with his characteristic ability to maim his landscapes – as in the sky here, the ‘tossing about of the stuffings of pack-saddles among remnants of blue taffeta’.9
Dubois seems also to have been the first to draw attention to the presence in the painting of an intruder – a cat sitting on a milk pail. A few weeks later the Literary Gazette thought the offending animal was the accidental result of atoms falling from Constable’s whiting bag. Academicians were heard asking one another, ‘Have you seen the cat?’ The guilty party was named as Edwin Landseer, who on a varnishing day had mischievously converted several of Constable’s white blobs into ‘a very pretty and intellectual cat’. Although the cat on the pail soon vanished, as the artist went on reworking his picture, another cat has since been spotted by a sharp-eyed observer, a tiny shape on the window sill of the farmhouse. Constable’s revenge?10
The Valley Farm was another example of what had become a true Constable failing: his inability to leave well enough alone. It had always been a tendency; it was now a bad habit. He asked Leslie to drop by after he got the picture back from the Academy; he admired Leslie for his reworking of his own paintings, and he wanted him to see The Valley Farm ‘now, for it has proved to me what my art is capable of when time can be given sufficient to carry it home’. Constable spelled out to John Chalon his improvements to Mr Vernon’s picture: ‘Oiling out, making out, polishing, scraping, &c. seem to have agreed with it exceedingly. The “sleet” and “snow” have disappeared, leaving in their places, silver, ivory, and a little gold.’ In mid-December The Valley Farm was back with Mr Vernon at his great house in Pall Mall but Constable told William Carpenter that he hadn’t finished with it; it was coming back to him for ‘more last words’. Once in a while Constable recognised that his mania to rework things was counter-productive. Henry Syer Trimmer reported that Constable kept Lucas at work altering time and again a large plate – for a Salisbury Cathedral engraving, apparently – but finally exclaimed, ‘Lucas, I only wish you could bring it to the state it was nine months ago.’ Too many ‘last words’ made for the downside of his perfectionism.11
Comparing this view of Willy Lott’s house with other versions of the subject did The Valley Farm no favours. Pictures he had done of the spot at various times both early and late had much more life, for example The Mill Stream of 1811–14, Scene on a River of 1830–7 (V&A) and Farmhouse near the water’s edge of c.1834 (also V&A). Despite Constable’s belief that he had preserved ‘God Almighty’s daylight’, the painting lost its sparkle; the bitumen he used to glaze it perhaps helped its attraction when he painted it but soon cracked and faded.12 It now seems a dead-end picture, a tired re-enactment of his Stour valley days in which – rather than daylight – gloom, gloom, gloom is the prevailing feature. Gothic was of course à la mode. Some recent viewers have detected elements of anguished nostalgia in it. ‘The tortured surface … suggests an almost desperate attempt to recreate the past,’ writes Leslie Parris, while for David Hill it is a scene from a nightmare, the man ferrying the bonneted young woman a sort of Charon, using his quant pole to push his boat across a murky Styx rather than rippling Stour.13
*
It was a year of family upheaval once again – this time centred on Charley going off to sea. The boy had brine in his blood. His early drawings had been of boats and at the Pierces’ school in Folkestone he had kept one eye on his books, the other on the Channel. Boner accompanied Charley on a river trip to Gravesend in July 1834. ‘A glorious piece of happiness for me,’ Charley wrote to his father. ‘We spent a very pleasant day there, it was very rough, we went in a little boat after we came down in the steamer and nea[r]ly we ship[p]ed several good seas.’ (The Reverend Pierce hadn’t had much success with Charley’s spelling.) Charley wrote to his brother John enthusiastically, ‘You can have no idea of the opposition of the Gravesend steamers on Gravesend Pier, such a pulling and fighting between the sailors, it was tremendous.’14 Pursuing his vocation, Charley – fourteen that year – returned to Gravesend to stay for several days with the Brenchley family and in the autumn of 1834 went up to Suffolk on Sidey Constable’s coasting barge Telegraph; he wrote to his father on 10 November of the excitements of the voyage to Mistley: ‘We ran through the Swin [channel] on Sunday morning & I heaved the lead for 7 miles[.] Side had a bath in the Thames rather more than he liked but I pride myself of his catching hold of an oar which I held out to him. He went bang under & was very much frightened.’15 On his return, Constable’s sister Mary wrote to her brother from Flatford:
Your clever son Charles Golding took leave of his Suffolk friends, & set off with Captain Sidey to join the ship … yesterday – the young waterman was in high spirits & he seemed without care or any earthly trouble & I trust we shall soon hear from you of his safe arrival under your roof.
We found him a very interesting youth, even if he had not been your son … We all did all we could to make him happy & his company was quite beyond his age … The wind being fair the voyage will most likely be a … quick one.
The Telegraph voyage confirmed Charley’s nautical ambitions. He was studying mathematics with a new tutor, W.E. Bickmore, to help with his navigation. Constable considered the navy for him but was told that in this now twentieth year of peace the Admiralty list for would-be midshipmen was long.16 The East India Company was the next option. Family connections were brought into play. In East Bergholt Abram got some personal details of Captain William Hopkins, who commanded the Buckinghamshire: ‘I call’d at Mrs Clark’s this morning & told her what you said of Captain Hopkins, & they speak very highly both of him & the service, he is the brother of Miss Hopkins who was with them several years as Governess … and he has work’d his way up to his present situation from small beginnings, & why should not Charles, with his good conduct & abilities …?’ As Abram no doubt knew, Charley’s abilities were apparent, his good conduct somewhat more potential.
The household was put into a frenzy as Charley’s departure loomed. Constable wrote to Leslie on the longest day of 1835: ‘I wish Charley well at sea – for his own sake. He is an extraordinary boy, and if his genius does not destroy him it will be the making of him – but my fear is more than my hope!!’ Constable proudly painted a portrait of Charley in his new merchant marine uniform – Mr Vernon’s purchase of The Valley Farm helped pay for the necessary seagoing clothing, and his rigging-out kept Mrs Roberts and the maids more than usually busy.17 In early August Leslie heard again from Constable:
My poor Charley’s time is now very short in the land of comfort. The ship sails this week. The house has been long in a stir with his ‘outfit’ – there seems no end to the wants … What would Diogenes or an old sow (much the same thing) say to all this display of trousers, jackets, & by dozens – blue & white shirts by scores – and a supply of ratlin for the hammock, as he expects to be often cut down.
Constable was trying to be light-hearted but he felt stricken at the prospect of saying goodbye to the lad, who was ‘full of sentiment & poetry & determination & integrity’. Nine-year-old Robert Leslie was allowed to accompany Constable, Alfred, and Mrs Roberts to look around the Buckinghamshire in the East India Dock, with Charley, according to his father, promising to ‘show how the planks are laid, and the “timbers” and all’.18 (Robert Leslie, as noted, became a skilled amateur sailor and boatbuilder as well as a professional sea-painter; this visit – together with Turner’s rigging of his toy-ship at Petworth – may have helped determine his life.) Charley hung close to his father and asked him to stay until the next day, but Constable couldn’t bear to prolong the farewell; he shook hands and said goodbye.19 But he was happy with his view of the Buckinghamshire: ‘A noble ship, the size of a 74.’20
By the end of August Charley’s real sea life had begun. He wrote several letters home while the Buckinghamshire, bound for Bombay, called at Gravesend and Spithead. The ship had been held up in the Thames by thick fog. On 30 August: ‘We anchored a few miles below Woolwich late in the evening because we went against the tide. We had two large foreign steamboats tow us down on each side. When the anchor went [down] it brought to my mind exactly how you had described it to me on board the Coutes.’ Charley observed that when the anchor was raised next morning, the sailors heaved at the capstan while a fiddle was played to encourage their efforts. He’d found the only disagreeable thing so far was to be awakened out of a sound sleep ‘to keep two cold hours watch’. Luckily he’d got a well-ventilated berth near a hatch. From the anchorage at St Helens, off the Isle of Wight, they had collected cargo and passengers, and glimpsed the Victory moored in Portsmouth harbour. Then they set off down Channel in a hard blow, with Charley aloft on the mizzen topsail yard, reefing the sail, letting go one line, hauling on another, while the ship pitched, rolled, and lurched in the heavy seas. Charley told his father in a last note sent with the pilot as he was dropped off Start Point: ‘We have a great many gentlemen passengers on board … Some of them had a hearty laugh at seeing my cap blow far away to leeward from the mizen and just after went my right shoe.’21
Constable proudly told Leslie that his son was ‘a true sailor – he makes up his mind to combat all difficulties in calms or storms with an evenness of mind – which little belongs to me, a landsman. They have had a rough business of it so far.’ And to George Constable in Arundel, where Charley’s brother John had been staying, Constable wrote frankly about his anxious time:
I have done all for the best, and I regret all that I have done, when I consider that it was to bereave me of this delightfully clever boy, who would have shone in my own profession, and who is now doomed to be driven about on the ruthless sea. It is a sad and melancholy life, but he seems made for a sailor. Should he please the officers and stick to the ship, it will be more to his advantage than being in the navy, – a hateful tyranny, with starvation into the bargain.22
Constable’s early experience in Lavenham apparently still left its mark. Those in authority could well be tyrants. But perhaps he also remembered his own struggle to follow the path he had picked out, and his father’s acquiesence in and support for what he chose to do.
Charley had preoccupied him this year but not to the exclusion of all else, though the other children got less dramatic attention. The girls were still at Miss Noble’s in Hampstead. Emily, now ten, wrote in June 1835:
My dear Papa,
I hope you will be pleased with this my first letter and I will try that my next shall be better. The holidays will very soon begin, and I trust you will find me improved in my studies. Give my love to my Brothers, and to Roberts,
And believe me, your affectionate child,
Emily Constable23
Minna seized any chance to be maternal and tidied up her father’s possessions to a point where he couldn’t find anything. Constable took Minna and young John down to George Constable’s for a few days in July and was happy walking among the riverside willows and hanging woods of the Arun valley. Alfie was also at a Hampstead school, run by Mr Brooks. Constable told Leslie, ‘He plays first fiddle there in everything but his books – but poor boy, his whole life till now has been one of afflictions, which as well as his drollery … has endeared him to me – perhaps unduly so.’ Lionel went for a while to a dame’s school kept by a Mrs Rawley but then joined Alfie at the Brooks establishment. As for young John, now studying in London, he went off happy and well on a trip to France, though he didn’t care for the food there: too much vinegar in everything. He visited the Louvre but wasn’t marked by the experience. The only picture he remembered, when being debriefed, was (Constable reported to Leslie) ‘the Watteau, “where ever so many cupids & people were flying about the sky & climbing up the mast of a boat.” As to Ruisdael, Claude, Poussin & Titian, he knows little and cares less.’ Constable himself was still set against the Continent; he wrote to Boner in late June declining an invitation to Germany to see the mountains. ‘Such a range of scenery … would expand my ideas of landscape’ but also cause him, he feared, ‘to lose his character as a painter’.24 That character was to some members of the public still uncertain. Constable was asked to testify at this time in a dispute about the genuineness of a purported Claude. In its report on the matter, The Times called him an ‘amateur painter’.25 In March 1836 he wrote again to Boner to say things were going smoothly: ‘My own “oneness” of pursuit leads to little change, more than the subject on my easil, but thank God all the children are well.’26
His son John was studying ‘Chymistry, Anatomy & Materia Medica’, with lectures and anatomy lessons in the daytime and extra tuition in Latin from Charley’s tutor Mr Bickmore in the evenings. John had thoughts of becoming a clergyman or doctor or even both after Cambridge. Now that Boner had departed, he was also serving as his father’s personal assistant. John told Constable about the visitors who called when he was away lecturing and kept him up to date with household finances: ‘The money will hold out very well.’ Constable in turn did his best to keep his son informed, telling him, for example, ‘Mr Vernon paid me for the picture.’ In December 1835 young John was entered as a future student of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. A few days later Abram called at Charlotte Street with six gallons of linseed oil for David Lucas, ‘as pure as the seed can produce it’, Abram said. (The family firm continued to be useful.) Constable and John went to Flatford for a week at Christmas and Mary thought the occasion was ‘a very happy one’. (The girls went to stay with their aunt Louisa Sanford in Wimbledon.) Constable had been consulted by Abram on works at Dedham Mill – the shaft of which needed repair – and Abram was next involved in what Mary called ‘vast works’ on the lock gates there: ‘His heart well nigh fails him under all his cares.’27
While at Flatford, Constable discussed with his brother and sister a proposal Mary had put forward – ‘between hope and fright’ – to buy some local land. Abram, as always cautious about spending capital, had reservations at first but didn’t discourage her when she got interested in part of the Coleman estate, which included Old House Farm and land called Fishers. Mary asked: What if she took the former and Constable took the latter? ‘A small portion of England in East Bergholt … would prove a harmless link of worldly pleasure,’ she suggested. It was on the east side of the village, south of the road from the centre, some way beyond the lane that went down to Flatford, and next to the Dodnice River and some beautiful woods. The timber was excellent though brother Golding didn’t altogether approve of the soil. The price being asked was £4,000. She thought it a benefit, should they become ‘Easterns’, that the new rail road wouldn’t cross the land. (This was the Ipswich section of the Eastern Counties Railway, designed to run eventually from London to Yarmouth, and then built as far north as Colchester.) In May 1836 Abram wrote to Constable to say the purchase had been agreed – a deposit of £200 paid and completion to be at Michaelmas. Mary intended to farm all the land and pay rent to Constable for his part of it; she anticipated much pleasure from it. By 20 May 1836 she had engaged an elderly couple, Mr and Mrs Crosbie, to help with the farm and dairy.
Constable thus became the owner of Bergholt land. The family’s former house was still owned by Mr and Mrs Walter Clerk who had bought it in 1818. Abram in May 1836 said that he had spent ‘a most agreeable evening … at the Old House’, and that Mr Clerk – with long-term health problems – was ‘much better, but tender’. The new Constable land was shown on the local tithe map for 30 December 1837, with Mary as the occupier, and a tithes and rent charge of £32 6s od paid to the incumbent rector, Reverend Joshua Rowley. Various buildings and pieces of land owned by Constable and Mary were specified on the map. They included Little Taylor’s, Whins, Flax Field, Barn Field, Gar, Bean Field, Cross Path Field, Bridge Field, Lays, Long Meadow, Long Fen, Stoneland’s, Coleman’s, Fisher’s Fen, Forty Acres, Broom Knoll, Quaking Fen, Fisher’s Field, Wright’s Fen, Great Taylors, Park Field, Spooners, an allotment, some yards, some buildings and a garden. Bergholt names. But for the moment Constable didn’t have the chance to visit his new property.28