Preface

Constable laboured for many years with little popular success. The Royal Academy treated him haughtily as just a landscape painter, barely deserving recognition. But then the French took him up – gold medals were bestowed – and the London art world slowly opened its eyes to what he was up to. He had a select following at the time of his death and then the world came to his works and adopted them as images of an England that suddenly fitted its picture of itself (or aspiration for itself) as green and pleasant. Constable became quintessential. During the First World War, Maurice Baring wrote to Ettie Desborough about her journal, in which she had discussed the deaths of two of her sons in Flanders. ‘It sums up all that is best in England, and English things, like a Constable landscape or a speech in Shakespeare.’¹ Later, there seems to have been a reaction against this at once aesthetic and patriotic admiration of Constable, as if it were all too overwhelming, swamped by nostalgia, even a bit old hat. But now one senses the tide turning again. Perhaps rightly it was in Paris in 2002 that a selection of Constable works – Le Choix de Lucian Freud – was displayed at the Grand Palais and forcefully reminded us of the revolutionary in Constable as well as what now seems traditional – indeed, reminded us of his single-minded passion for landscape at a time when painting water meadows and river banks was regarded as not quite the thing. Without him we wouldn’t have as essential parts of our beings the out-of-doors elements of an England that he saw, felt and painted.

It isn’t much of an exaggeration to say that the last biography of John Constable was published 163 years ago. In the years since, a great amount has of course been written about Constable, including several brief lifes and much art history in the shape of critical studies, scholarly monographs, and exhibition catalogues. But Charles Leslie’s Memoirs of the Life of John Constable of 1843, an astute selection of letters to and from Constable linked by a friendly commentary, has remained the text to conjure with, both charming and persuasive. However, the lacks in Leslie’s Life have also become increasingly evident: his tendency to see the best or least-troubled side of Constable; and his habit of excising anything that might strike an early-Victorian reader as coarse or indiscreet, such as getting rid of the words ‘cow-dung’ in a letter Constable wrote to the engraver David Lucas or leaving out the names of artists Leslie felt would be embarrassed by being featured in an anecdote.² And though Leslie chose cleverly from the letters available to him, he didn’t have to hand the massive amount of correspondence which Ronald Beckett edited into half a dozen volumes in the 1960s and to which two supplementary volumes were soon added. Unfortunately also missing in Beckett’s haul are many letters to the Dunthornes, father and son, that were apparently destroyed in the 1920s.³ Nevertheless, the Constable correspondence assembled by Beckett is probably the biggest trove of documentation concerning any English artist and it has remained a vital resource and rather intractable tool for getting at John Constable.

Beckett’s work was comprehensive yet forbidding. It arranged the hundreds of letters not in one chronological sequence but in a series of volumes divided by theme: family, friends, fellow artists, letters to Leslie and so on. To find out what was happening to Constable in, say, 1827, the reader has to consult eight books and collate the findings, together with details from other sources that Beckett chose to interpolate between the letters. So Beckett’s masterwork was both boon and bother. It gave some Constable scholars, sitting with the pale green volumes (splendidly published by the Suffolk Records Society) on a shelf near their desks, the right to say no other biographical text was needed: Leslie was charming and, as for the rest, it was all in Beckett … Yes. But. In the numerous volumes of the Correspondence there are so many trees that the wood which is John Constable is hard to discern.

I have enjoyed Leslie’s Memoirs and have adopted a year-by-year framework much like his for this book. Yet, although some of the same material has gone into this account, I have all in all selected differently from the correspondence. I have – to make use of an artistic term, chiaroscuro, that Constable bandied about – given equal stress to the chiaro and the scuro, feeling that Leslie downplayed the darkness visible in Constable’s life and works, particularly in the latter part of his career. And while naturally concerned with the work which brought him, in England, a largely posthumous renown, I have devoted substantial attention to his protracted love affair with Maria Bicknell, from their first meeting when she was about twelve (and he was a grown man) to their eventual marriage and tragically abbreviated married life. I have dealt at greater length with the ups and downs of their many children and Constable’s concerns for them. He was torn between his two ambitions, between trying to perfect his life and perfect his work, though he hoped that his realm encompassed and was enriched by both his art and his family.

Spring: East Bergholt Common. Mezzotint engraving by David Lucas, after John Constable, 1830.