THE FIRST ACADEMY exhibition in the new buildings on what was becoming Trafalgar Square was also the first in thirty-four years not to have John Constable on hand. His son John was now head of the family, but Charles Leslie had his work cut out as friend, adviser and protector to the Constable children. For a start, Leslie ensured that Constable was represented at the Academy exhibition. An RA rule allowed an artist’s hitherto unexhibited work to be hung at the first exhibition after his death, and so Arundel Mill and Castle was entered by Leslie on Constable’s behalf. So were two smaller pictures, but the selectors seem to have thought these weren’t sufficiently finished. At the exhibition, Arundel Mill was received in the light of its creator’s passing, for the most part kindly. John Bull declared that the painting showed how great a loss the public had suffered. In recent years, its writer said, Constable had spoiled some of his beautiful works by whitewashing them. Yet now he stood high as a draughtsman, colourist and artist ‘of feeling, science, and power’. The paper presciently concluded: ‘His early works are truth and nature themselves; and, unless we much mistake, all his works, now that he is gone, will be held in very great estimation.’ (Constable would have noted ruefully that he was indeed on the way to being a popular artist, even if going, i.e. dying, had to be part of the process.) The Reverend John Eagles, reviewer for Blackwood’s, moderated his usual offensiveness by saying the painting was unfinished and it was therefore unfair to exhibit it. But Eagles was sorry at the loss of Constable and said ‘some of his earlier pictures were both sweetly and vigorously painted’. Arundel Mill and Castle was among the works put up for sale by the artist’s administrators on 16 May 1838 and was bought in on behalf of John Charles Constable.1
Leslie cautioned the young man to lock up all the sketches that had been left lying loose on the floor of his father’s painting room. Leslie also set about organising a committee to buy one of Constable’s larger pictures as a permanent memorial and donate it to the National Gallery. Clarkson Stanfield was among several warm supporters of the plan. Reverend Judkin, William Carpenter and William Purton joined in. The ‘large Salisbury’ – Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows – was considered; Leslie asked John Charles to leave the key to the Charlotte Street studio with Mrs Roberts so that would-be donors to the gift fund could look at it and other Constable paintings there. Eventually the large Salisbury was judged to be too boldly executed and not suitable for ‘the general taste’. The Cornfield, Purton’s recommendation, was chosen instead. The estate valued it at three hundred guineas. Sir William Beechey was appointed chairman of the money-raising committee and over a hundred people subscribed. David Wilkie sent five guineas; William Wordsworth and Michael Faraday gave too. On 9 December 1837 the Trustees of the National Gallery gratefully accepted the painting to which the artist had once given ‘a little more eye-salve than usual’. One old friend of the artist who visited Charlotte Street, the miniature painter Andrew Robertson, felt melancholy at the great number of works Constable had left; this showed how little his merits had been recognised. But he thought the presence of The Cornfield in the National Gallery would prevent Constable’s works being buried until, eventually dug up, they were ‘brought to live in another age’.2
At his death Constable was worth about £25,000. He had £528 in his bank account with Cocks Biddulph at Charing Cross. The Bank of England held in his name £12,000 in annuities that Charles Bicknell’s legacy had purchased for the benefit of Maria and the children. Abram owed him £4,000 on which 4 per cent interest was due. Others, including Dr Herbert Evans and Lancelot Archer-Burton, owed him more than £1,000. The contents of his houses – both leased – were worth over £500 and his ‘Books Pictures Prints Drawings and other Articles relating to the Fine Arts’, £1,900. Yet the administrators of his estate felt more should be raised to cover the future needs of his children, and so some works would be auctioned.3
The sale occurred during thirteen days in May 1838. Beforehand Leslie and Mr Foster of the auctioneers came to Charlotte Street to list items for the catalogue. Leslie varnished some of the paintings, starting with The Chain Pier, Brighton. John Charles had transferred from Corpus Christi to Jesus College, Cambridge, to be with Osmond Fisher, and during his Christmas and Easter vacations he began to ‘set the pictures to rights’, listing all the oil sketches, drawings and prints he found at Well Walk and Charlotte Street, while trying to pursue his algebra studies, a task that laid him low. Meanwhile, Foster’s advertisements for the sale were appearing in the press and visitors began to call at Charlotte Street to look at the pictures, among them William Carpenter, the Hampstead amateurs Henry Hebbert and W.G. Jennings, General Rebow and several friends of Leslie’s.4
At the time the sale didn’t seem a great success. Prices obtained were generally low. The art trade was obviously uncertain about bidding for works – thrown suddenly on the market – of a landscape artist whose reputation wasn’t clear cut. However, on the first day of the sale, 10 May 1838, many of the 5,000 prints and drawings were sold. They included prints of works by Titian and Claude, and original drawings by Richard Wilson, Gainsborough and George Frost. The prints and drawings fetched a total of £648 12s 6d. Most of the buyers were in the trade, but John Sell Cotman was one bidder who entered the fray with the dealers. Twenty-nine of the cloud and sky studies sold for £3 11s. As for the Constable/Lucas venture English Landscape, the copyright, plates and more than 7,000 unsold prints were offered but bought in for £100. Perhaps just as well, for the prints proved useful in a few years’ time to Charles Leslie. Lucas himself was ill-served by Constable’s death. The loss of his patron took place as photography advanced. With a declining practice, the talented printmaker eventually took to drink and spent some time in the Fulham workhouse before his death in 1881.5
The paintings put up for sale on 15 and 16 May included copies Constable had made of some of his favourite old masters and his own original works. Nearly 150 of these paintings were sold and twenty-five bought in; the proceeds £1,764. Some of his full-size oil sketches were now seen in public for the first time, among them two sketches for The Hay Wain and The Leaping Horse, bought in for £14 10s to be given by Purton and Carpenter to the Constable children. The large oil sketches weren’t valued highly: the Hadleigh Castle exhibited in 1829 sold for £105 and the full-size sketch for it for £3 13s 6d. Many of Constable’s works raised doubts; no one knew enough about him or about all these pictures suddenly released on the art world. What was typical? What was a sound investment? The White Horse went to the children’s legal guardian, Lancelot Archer-Burton, for the highest price of the sale, £157 10s. (Archer-Burton, who had changed his name from Lancelot South on inheriting property, was married to Constable’s cousin Jane Gubbins; their son Burton, Folkestone schoolmate of Constable’s two oldest sons, followed John Charles up to Cambridge.) John Charles attended the sale and bought three paintings, one a View of London from Hampstead Heath. The number of dealers on hand indicated that some in the trade suspected a rise in Constable futures. Samuel Archbutt bought fourteen paintings. J.H. Smith, acting for John Sheepshanks, tussled with a collector named Anderton for Water Meadows at Salisbury, the ‘nasty green thing’ the RA selectors had wanted to reject in 1830; Smith obtained it for Sheepshanks for £35. 14s. Despite the many pictures returned to the family, and despite the less than dramatic prices, the Foster sale got many Constables out into the world and gave the name resonance.6
The houses in Well Walk and Charlotte Street were emptied of much material that had sustained them. The children weren’t badly off: to the Bicknell legacy and their father’s funds was added a bequest from Constable’s older brother Golding, warden of Lady Dysart’s woods, who died in March 1838 aged sixty-four. The children moved to 16 Cunningham Place, St John’s Wood, where they were closer to Archer-Burton (in Grove End Road) and Charles Leslie (in Pine Apple Place). There Mrs Roberts went on putting her heart and soul into their care. Charley referred to ‘Old Lady Ribbons’ in a letter in 1846, and in 1853 he asked Minna to give ‘Old Bob’ two sovereigns from him as ‘a little remembrance’. She was mentioned in family correspondence as late as 1862. Uncle Abram came to Cunningham Place to see his nephews and nieces in February 1839 and found it, though smaller than Charlotte Street, ‘comfortable’ and ‘convenient’. (Hints of discord appeared between the heirs and Uncle Abram.) Charley had learned about his father’s death on arriving in Bombay after a gale-ridden voyage. He wrote to his brother John, ‘How hard it seems that the Almighty should have snatched so kind and good a Father from us.’ Charley wanted to know that some of the drawings and sketchbooks were safe, and mentioned them anxiously again in his next letter: ‘I mean the Book of Sketches in the Coutes Indiaman and the two Brighton sketch books.’ The drawings dealt with the sea, which was now Charley’s world. At the end of August 1838 he came back to England and quit the Buckinghamshire. However, he went on learning navigation, studied steam engineering, and talked of becoming the mate of a brig and serving in the Mediterranean. But as with many a Conradian hero, the East had seduced him. He was commissioned a midshipman in the Indian Navy in April 1839. In India he met a naval lieutenant who recalled riding in a Hampstead coach with John Constable some years before. The artist had in his lap a toy cutter, a gift for his son, who he said was passionate about ships. The lieutenant begged him not to let Charles go to sea. He would be away from his family for long periods; promotion was so slow. And Charley ran into both problems. He made lieutenant in 1845 and commander eighteen years after that. He conducted surveys of Eastern waters – the chart he drew of the Persian Gulf was still used in 1936.7 He married in 1861, the only Constable child to do so, his wife a Maida Vale girl, who died in childbirth. Charley’s second wife was the daughter of next-door neighbours in Cunningham Place. Five of his children, Constable’s only grandchildren, survived childhood. Charley retired in 1863 with the honorary rank of captain and came back to England for good.8
*
John and Maria Constable’s family was generally neither robust nor lucky. Minna had survived her bout of scarlet fever, but two of her siblings didn’t. Emily – who shared the same birthday as Charley – caught the disease in May 1839, aged fourteen. Dr Evans came frequently, as he had done for Minna, and Mrs Roberts looked after her day and night (she too caught scarlet fever but was tough enough to live). Emily – Emma – Ema – died on 8 May. Scarlet fever used to kill more children in Britain than any other disease; it brought on a very high temperature, strawberry-red tongue and face, painful throat infection and rashes. Emily’s brother John once again stuck his head in the sand. He wrote from Cambridge, ‘There is nothing that I dislike so much as to be present on such occasions, besides while I am away it seems more dream like.’9 John was now interested in the chemistry of photography, but was also caught up by religion – he hoped to obtain a curacy after taking his degree. He was engaged to Mary Atkinson, daughter of the Surrey couple who had looked after him when he broke down after his father’s death. His rooms at Cambridge were full of Constable’s paintings and sketches. He told Mary about a dream one of his university friends had had about him. A service was being held in the college chapel and the congregation were looking at a lancet window in which young John was seated, wearing episcopal robes, with a mitre on his head. But there was neither curacy nor bishopric to come. His forebodings kept him from funerals, but for other people John didn’t duck reality; his medical studies involved working in Cambridge hospital wards, and while getting such hands-on experience he too contracted scarlet fever. John Charles died on 21 March 1841. He was buried in Jesus College chapel, the last person to be buried there. Osmond Fisher arranged for a tablet in John’s memory over the grave.10
Loss piled on loss, therefore. Charley as the oldest surviving son was now head of the family. But Minna, two years older, was on the spot and effectively in charge of affairs, with legal help from J.D. Haverfield, a friend of her father’s. Borrowings of drawings and prints made her anxious; she missed having someone close by to comfort her. ‘I begin to feel the loss of a mother now more than ever,’ she said. And the children seemed to have inherited from their father some of his prickliness. Charles in the late 1860s denounced as fakes a number of Constable pictures that were in fact genuine. He also bore a long grudge against Minna and Isabel for the way they shared out Constable’s works among the surviving children in five supposedly equal parts at the end of 1847. He said they had divided among themselves all the shipping pictures he believed belonged to him. Later, when he was twenty-six, Minna twenty-eight, and Isabel twenty-five, he recorded his problems with his sisters and noted ‘all love has been quenched in their lonely hearts’. They thought he had taken advantage of them. The sniping and griping was passed down. Charley’s second son Hugh Golding Constable relayed the memories of his side of the family of how small-minded his aunts had been: ‘They had been belles & asked everywhere & spoilt and besides that they lived in London.’ At least it was clear as they squabbled over the pictures that they knew they had inherited a treasure.11
The habit of art was attached to them all. John Charles and Charles Golding both drew ships. Isabel attended the School of Design at Somerset House where ‘classes for Females’ were held and she went on to paint skilful plant and flower studies. Alfred and Lionel had a reputation of being hard to handle when together – ‘unsettled wild boys’, Minna called them in a letter to Charley in India – but both studied painting and showed strongly their father’s influence as landscape artists. Alfred, on leaving school aged sixteen, went to stay with Uncle Abram and Aunt Mary in Flatford where he fished and boated and sketched the meadows below Fen Bridge. He had thought of going to sea like Charley but after a period of drawing from the Antique at the British Museum enrolled at what had been the Sass Academy, now moved to Bloomsbury Street and run by F.S. Cary, a former Sass pupil. Lionel, after dallying with farming, also went to Cary’s Academy and drew the plaster casts. When Alfred exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1847, Charley wrote to Minna to say, ‘It is a great comfort though to see Alfa actually exhibiting, this looks as if he was all right, but I remain very anxious about Toby.’ Toby – that is Lionel – was in fact the most talented; he had four paintings at the RA in 1850; his works sometimes showed original flair but were also on occasion taken for his father’s. He and Alfred sent samples to each other and also to Charley who wrote, ‘I should like wild bits or coast bits, racey of course … let them have “breadth”.’ By ‘racey’ Charley seems to have meant something not tame, something with punch. Raciness was a term Constable had used in writing to John Fisher.12
But the promising careers of both young Constables were abbreviated. Robert Leslie later described how Alfred and Lionel were rowing across the Thames above the weir at Goring Mill when their home-made boat upset. ‘It was in November, 1853, on a dark, frosty evening, and, though able to swim, he [Alfred] sank before reaching the river bank, overcome probably by cold and shock. His brother Lionel narrowly escaped being carried over the weir, and, on looking round after reaching shore, was horrified to find that Alfred … had disappeared.’ The family believed that Lionel suffered a stroke following his brother’s drowning. He gave up painting and occupied his time with carpentry, photography, sailing, and making fireworks. By 1885, towards the end of his life, he was living in St John’s Wood again with Minna and Isabel.13
After John Constable’s death, it wasn’t long before his life was given literary shape. John Fisher in 1826 had already seen his friend as a subject and said that he had always wanted to write about Constable’s life as an artist,14 but he never managed to do so. His own life slipped away before Constable’s. Charles Boner, who went off to become a tutor to a princely family in Germany, and who composed well-regarded poetry and travel books, also missed his chance, though he had preserved a store – almost a shrine – of Constable memories. ‘I ought to have done it,’ he said years later (in 1865). ‘No one could write such a life of Constable as I might have done. To know all the beauty and sweetness of that man’s mind one must have been with him always, as I was.’15
The person who got in first, forestalled Boner, and seemed for many years to have written the only necessary Life was Charles Leslie. He started pulling together material not long after Constable died. He obtained recollections from the children. In 1840 he went to Flatford, accompanied by William Purton, visited the mill and saw the old family house up in the village; what Leslie described as a handsome mansion was then unoccupied and was soon to be pulled down. Leslie talked to Abram, who had once claimed his brother John would be famous, after death if not before. He visited Constable’s sisters and had for guides to the locality young John and his cousin the Reverend Daniel Whalley.16 Leslie did a first-rate job of assembling anecdotes and letters and converting them into the Memoirs of the Life of John Constable, Esq., R.A. The first edition of around two hundred copies, brought out in 1843 with James Carpenter as the nominal publisher, was illustrated from the overstock of English Landscape prints, supplied by Minna in return for thirty free copies of the Life. (In 1843 Minna still had 186 sets of English Landscape, several thousand prints in all.)17 Although her brother Charles was annoyed that Leslie had related some of his adolescent adventures on the Buckinghamshire, he approved of the general thrust: ‘The good, quiet, character of poor Papa is kept up throughout.’ One hundred and five copies of the book went to subscribers. Leslie might have noted once more that Constable’s friends ‘compensated for their fewness by their sincerity and their warmth’ – and their willingness to shell out for the book. A second ‘popular’ edition was called for, smaller in format, and illustrated only by two portraits of Constable and one mezzotint, that of Spring: East Bergholt Common. Longmans published it in 1845. Although it was slow to sell, other editions eventually followed.18
Leslie was praised for the skill with which he let Constable tell the story in his own words, although in fact he often modified or polished Constable’s language. He omitted names where he feared people might be embarrassed. He wanted to show Constable as a genius, but not one who was too earthy or rough-hewn. Maria’s protests against her husband’s overlong stays with the Beaumonts weren’t mentioned. This rose-tinting was later to be held against the biographer. Leslie’s ‘kindlier nature’ had clothed his portrait of Constable, Richard Redgrave thought in his Century of Painters of 1866. Elsewhere Redgrave suggested that Leslie’s Constable was agreeable but insufficient: ‘He appears all amiability and goodness, and one cannot recognise the bland, yet intense, sarcasm of his nature: soft and amiable in speech, he yet uttered sarcasms which cut you to the bone.’19 Even Leslie seems to have recognised that the portrait needed darker shading. In his Autobiographical Reflections of 1860, he drew attention to Constable’s love of approbation and insistence on getting his own way. Unlike Turner, who wasn’t so articulate and never talked of his own art if he could help it, Constable couldn’t be prevented from talking of his feelings and views on art. Leslie noted, ‘This made him extremely interesting to those who could feel with him, but either tiresome or repulsive to those who could not.’20
By mid-century Constable was the subject of increasing interest, and in the pros and cons of what was said about him we discern a radical rather than conservative artist. The art critic P.G. Hamerton confessed to failing to recognise what Constable was up to early on, but waking up to it in the mid-1860s. Constable, he wrote, ‘did not see lines but spaces, and in the spaces he did not see simple gradations, but an immense variety of differently coloured sparkles and spots. This variety really exists in nature, and Constable first directed attention to it.’ Hamerton pointed out that the French had not only taken up Constable earlier but continued to admire him. Paul Huet, Théodore Rousseau, Eugène Delacroix and many others claimed him as a messiah. For Delacroix, in 1858, Constable was ‘the father’ of modern French landscape painting, a ‘real reformer’, and, with Turner, one of the glories of English art; had the French but known it, the sparkles and spots of impressionism were shortly to appear. Théophile Thoré, the French writer who first cast a spotlight on the identity and works of Johannes Vermeer, wished The Cornfield were in Paris rather than London; in the Louvre, he thought, Constable’s painting would have been more greatly appreciated.21
One vocal and discordant voice was also heard. John Ruskin did not like Constable. It seemed to be almost personal, though they never met. It was as if Ruskin found in Constable’s work a direct affront to his hero Turner. For Ruskin wild mountain scenery was the thing; Constable was morbidly enamoured of a well-tended landscape and other subjects of a ‘low order’. Constable’s ‘early education and associations were … against him’. He couldn’t draw. ‘His works are also eminently wanting both in rest and refinement.’22 He was unteachable – by which Ruskin seemed to mean unaffected by the great authorities of the past; for instance, he wouldn’t let himself be instructed by the Scriptures. Moreover, his devotion to chiaroscuro and its shadows contributed to his damnation. His works were ‘mere studies of effect without any expression of specific knowledge’. And his effects, Ruskin complained (following Fuseli), were ‘greatcoat weather and nothing more’. Turner looked at a landscape and godlike saw ‘at a glance the whole sum of visible truth open to human intelligence’. Constable saw in the same scene merely what might be observed by an intelligent fawn and a skylark. Ruskin allowed that Constable might be original, honest, and free from affectation, but he was ultimately ‘nothing more than an industrious and innocent amateur blundering his way to a superficial expression of one or two popular aspects of common nature’. Ruskin was interested in skies, and in the neglect of them by contemporary painters; but he completely ignored Constable’s contribution to the subject.23
Leslie defended his old friend while he was Professor of Painting at the RA from 1847 to 1852. In his Handbook for Young Painters of 1855, based on his Academy lectures, Leslie declared that Constable filled a place among British painters that Turner, however great, couldn’t fill. Constable was ‘the most genuine painter of English cultivated scenery, leaving untouched its mountains and lakes’. Far from being unteachable, Constable from start to finish learned from previous masters; he made copies of Raphael cartoons, of etchings after and paintings by Ruysdael, and of paintings by Wilson, Rubens, Teniers and Claude. As for Ruskin’s charge that Constable was unable to draw, Leslie suggested that Ruskin had never seen a genuine painting by Constable – his impressions were perhaps founded on some of the forgeries that were now circulating or – a real dig – he had seen Constable pictures ‘without looking at them, which often happens when we are not interested’. Unlike Ruskin’s hero, ‘Constable never fell into the common mistake by which even Turner appears to have been influenced, namely, that what are called warm colours are essential to convey the idea of warmth in a landscape. The truth is, that red, orange, and yellow, are only seen in the sky at the coolest hours of the day, and brown and yellow tints, in the foliage of England, prevail only in the spring and autumn. But he [Constable] fearlessly painted midsummer noon-day heat, with blues, greens, and grays forming the predominant masses. And he succeeded.’24
Despite Ruskin, Constable’s stock was rising. John Charles and Minna had suspected that some visitors – aware of the increased value of his pictures – were ‘borrowing’ his works with no intention of returning them; James Brook Pulham, the son of a Constable patron, was a possible culprit. Moreover, fakes now began to appear. Charles Leslie wrote in 1843 to warn Francis Darby (who had bought two Hampstead paintings Constable had exhibited at the RA): ‘Constable’s pictures have so risen in value, that they are now eagerly sought for, and the consequence is there are many forgeries on the market, particularly of his small works, and it is dangerous for any one to buy a picture, professing to be his, unless they are sufficiently acquainted with his style.’25 Leslie thought that George Constable, brewer and amateur painter, was the author of some clumsy and ‘wretched imitations’ – and had no explanation of why the recent good friend would do this. A number of what Leslie’s son Robert called ‘extreme palette knife’ forgeries came to light in the 1840s, the paint still soft on them. Meanwhile, collectors of the real thing began to add to the inflationary impulse. Colonel James Lenox, the American who had in 1845 bought, via Leslie, Turner’s Staffa, Fingal’s Cave, three years later bought (with Leslie’s advice again) a small version of The Valley Farm. Lenox’s transatlantic lead was followed by John G. Johnson, J.P. Morgan, H.E. Huntington, Henry Clay Frick, and Andrew and Paul Mellon. Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows went for £600 in 1850. The White Horse fetched £630 in 1855. The Hay Wain was auctioned by Christie’s in 1866 and sold for £1,365 – a Benjamin West sort of price.26
It wasn’t just millionaires; a wider public was discovering Constable through works exhibited in museums, particularly the National Gallery and the South Kensington Museum, later the Victoria and Albert, the ‘V&A’. The Ashmolean in Oxford acquired a Constable in 1855, and the Royal Academy began to show his work outside the exhibition season. At the same time writers – among them Tom Taylor, P.G. Hamerton and the Redgrave brothers – expressed in print the new awareness. Ruskin may have provoked some, and others were encouraged by Constable’s reputation in France. There, his gold-medal status still reverberated. The Barbizon painters couldn’t have managed without him. As for the Impressionists, to take one example Monet’s Hyde Park scenes were in his debt.27
Isabel was the last of Constable’s children to die – unmarried and childless – in 1888, at the age of sixty-six, the same not very great age Minna had been when she died. Isabel had inherited the bulk of Minna’s and Lionel’s estates and was left with a large number of their father’s oils, watercolours, and drawings. She, Minna, and Lionel apparently agreed that the nation should be their heirs in this respect, and she gave the National Gallery six Constables and one of his palettes in 1887 and 88. (Henry Vaughan had also given it The Hay Wain in 1886.) The South Kensington Museum received what Isabel called ‘Landscape Sketches’ – ninety-two oils, 295 drawings and watercolours, and three sketchbooks. The British Museum got forty-seven drawings and watercolours and the Royal Academy fifteen oil studies. In her will Isabel bequeathed a further five paintings to the National Gallery: Scene on a Navigable River (Flatford Mill), The Cenotaph, The Glebe Farm, Hampstead Heath with a Rainbow, and Harwich Lighthouse. She left to the South Kensington Museum the oils Trees at Hampstead, Cottage in a Cornfield (which Constable had exhibited at the RA in 1833) and A Watermill at Gillingham, Dorset, together with the splendid watercolours of Old Sarum and Stonehenge. Visitors to London now had nearly 130 Constable oil paintings and some 350 drawings to look at, a far more generous collection of his work than had ever been seen. Two particular favourites for copyists were The Cornfield and Hampstead Heath with Harrow in the Distance – in 1891 the latter was the most copied ‘modern’ painting of the year. And Constable prices were still soaring. The White Horse went in 1894 for £6,510 to Agnews, who sold it to the banker J.P. Morgan. In 1895 Agnews bought Stratford Mill for £8,925 and Sir Samuel Montagu, another banker, acquired it from them.28
Constable was bankable; indeed, in the public press he was finally – in the words of the London Standard – ‘a great man’. Scholarly writers, led by Charles Holmes, began to consider his works. The critic Julius Meier-Graefe, in his 1908 book Modern Art, struck what was to become a common chord when he named what he – like Delacroix – saw as the twin peaks of British Art: ‘Turner draped the inartisitic in the most enchanting robes, and Constable presented the artistic in the simplest guise.’ Meier-Graefe was reminded by Constable of some contemporary artists, including ‘the best of these, Manet’. The French connection was still being made in 1937 when some sketches of Brighton beach by Constable led Kenneth Clark to think of Matisse.29
Although by the early twentieth century Constable was everywhere – on fire screens and tea cosies, jigsaws and biscuit tins, mass-produced prints and posters – his fame required closer definition. There was on the one hand the Constable of Constable Country, of The Hay Wain and The White Horse, the artist whose Flatford had become a national shrine; but there was also the Constable of the clouds, the views from Hampstead and the deeper recesses of Fen Lane, a much more private, low-key painter. And by then taste was coming round to judging Constable’s sketches and studies as superior to the paintings he finished for exhibition. Meier-Graefe, Holmes, Clive Bell, and Roger Fry all agreed on this. Fry wished Constable had spent less time elaborating the great machines which he intended to make an effect at the Academy. Fry found the ‘real Constable’ in the full-size studies for the exhibition pictures. Meier-Graefe was content with Constable as an artist who had never fully established himself: ‘a quiet spirit’ who ‘never knew the glory of the conqueror’. This Constable ‘lacked the kindling quality of astounding personalities. His art … had that simplicity of perfection, which repels the public and the public’s painters … His gift attains the abstract purity of the scientific fact, and its benefits are so universal that the giver is scarcely remembered.’30
The simplicity was also sincerity. The contemporary British painter Lucian Freud, German-born and Dedham art-school trained, selected Constable’s works for a large Paris exhibition in 2002–3; he said that ‘in Constable there is no false feeling. For me, Constable is so much more moving than Turner because you feel for him, it’s truth-telling about the land rather than using the land for compositions which suited his inventiveness.’ The ‘natural painter’ wasn’t into bravura. But truth-telling can be painful. Freud noted that it was impossible to think of van Gogh without recalling Constable’s dark-shadowed late paintings.31 And Constable’s celebrity creates its own feeling of déjà vu. Barges, farm wagons, slimy posts, lock gates, cornfields … all lead to critical close-down. Social historians condemn him for looking at landscape through a landowner’s eyes. Anita Brookner complains that none of the workers in his landscapes saunters easily through them: ‘all his characters have the appearance of serfs’.32
His territory also carries its burden. ‘Constable Country’ has become a real-estate term, albeit one in which the National Trust as well as developers and estate agents have a stake; the Trust owns a good deal of the land around Flatford. The ancient core of East Bergholt is now surrounded by executive housing for commuters to Ipswich and Colchester. But the centre of the village remains the curiously disjointed coming together of roads it was in Constable’s childhood, with church and pub prominent, and the main street curving in a way that makes visitors question their heading. St Mary’s church sits at a right-angle bend of the road, with the Dunthorne tomb standing near the graveyard wall and the sundial, still fixed over the church door, that John Dunthorne Senior kept painted. The old Constable family house has gone, but Constable’s little gambrel-roofed studio, Moss Cottage, stands nicely preserved next to a car-repair garage and across from the Red Lion. East Bergholt took its somewhat inchoate form from its large tract of common land and the lanes that radiated off around it to the ‘ends’ – the scattered dependent hamlets at Flatford, East End and Burnt Oak. The lane down to Flatford now decants tourist traffic into a fairly secluded National Trust car park. From here those looking for the scenes that made John Constable a painter can walk to the mill and the miller’s house, now a nature study centre, to Willy Lott’s house, and to the lock and a footbridge over the Stour with a riverside footpath through the meadows. From the slopes above the river the tower of Dedham church can still be seen, though when the leaves are off the trees you can also glimpse on the four-lane A12 the tops of the trucks whose sound just carries. However, autumn and winter are not Constable’s seasons.33 Spring and summer are, with the trees in leaf, the wheat ripening, any storms passing away, the white clouds scudding, and England as it never will be again.