3. Nature’s Proper Interest (1802–10)

MANY WAR-WEARY PEOPLE in England felt more cheerful in March 1802. The Treaty of Amiens was ratified and nine years of conflict with France were interrupted by a period of peace. The Channel could once again be crossed without fear of battle or captivity. Those who had been hungry for the Continent and its culture now took their chance to journey there: to board a packet boat from Dover to Calais, to take a diligence to Paris, to wander around the Louvre and admire the paintings which had been liberated from Italy by the armies of the Corsican monster, and then, pushing on across this country which seemed to promote both mob-terrorism and the sweetest charms of civilisation, to traverse the sublime, beautiful, fearsome Alps and visit the land which harboured so many vestiges of the classical world. Many artists in London jumped at this chance: the RA President Benjamin West, Henry Fuseli, Joseph Farington, and J.M.W. Turner, already a full Academician at twenty-seven, were among the cross-Channel voyagers. John Constable was not. Despite his admiration for Claude and Rubens, he had resolved to avoid imitation of and even exposure to other artists, and he stayed put in England. He seems to have had none of the restlessness that causes many to pack their bags and seek other lands; he never crossed the Straits of Dover. He had got as far as Derbyshire, and a few years on would actually reach the Lake District in the north-west of England; but, impelled to quit London, his main ambition was to catch the Ipswich stage and eight hours later find himself at home in Suffolk, there to walk with Dunthorne and sketch the woods, fields and streams around East Bergholt.

He was a stay-at-home artist, but he wasn’t entirely stuck in the mud. Captain Torin, a friend of his father, was to make his last voyage to the Orient for the East India Company in the spring of 1803 and invited Constable to join his ship Coutts for the first part of the passage. Turner was to say later, with his usual competitiveness, that Constable knew nothing about ships, but that wasn’t true. He may not have been a small-boat sailor like Turner but he had seafaring kinfolk. His mother’s brother John Watts had sailed with Captain James Cook. His cousin Sidey Constable captained the family’s coasting barge Telegraph on its voyages delivering grain and coal between London and East Anglia. He had watched river barges being built in the dry dock at Flatford and he knew how boats sat and moved in the water. Constable’s voyage with Captain Torin didn’t take him out of sight of England – it was largely in the Thames estuary and the inshore approaches to it, behind the Goodwin sands – but it lasted nearly a month. Constable told Dunthorne, ‘I saw all sorts of weather. Some the most delightfull, and some as melancholy … When the ship was at Gravesend, I took a walk on shore to Rochester and Chatham. Their situation is beautifull and romantic, being at the bottom of finely formed and high hills, with the river continually showing its turnings to great advantage. Rochester Castle is one of the most romantic I ever saw.’

At Chatham the viewer of romantic medieval ruins became a student of modern warships. He hired a boat and went down the River Medway to look at the men-of-war moored in it. He sketched three views of the Victory (this was two years before Trafalgar). ‘She was the flower of the flock,’ he continued enthusiastically in his 23 May 1803 letter to Dunthorne, ‘a three-decker of (some say) 112 guns. She looked very beautifull, fresh out of Dock and newly painted. When I saw her they were bending the sails – which circumstance, added to a very fine evening, made a charming effect.’ His nautical language was roughly correct – such as bending on the sails – and the drawings he made showed personality and skill of observation. For a better view he seems to have climbed to the top of a mast on one ship, maybe the Coutts herself. Unfortunately when the Coutts got around the North Foreland she ran into a south-westerly gale and had to shelter in the lee of the Kent coast for three days. ‘Here,’ wrote the artist (obviously not an aspiring sailor), ‘I saw some very grand effects of stormy clouds.’ As the Coutts got under way again for her voyage to China, Constable was landed by boat on the shingle beach at Deal and in the confusion of disembarkation left all his four weeks’ sketching on board – about 130 drawings, mostly small. From Deal he walked the ten miles to Dover and took a coach to London next day. His drawings were happily shipped on to him before the Coutts left the Channel and he later used some of the Medway sketches for a watercolour of the Victory at Trafalgar engaged with two French ships of the line.

The war with France was soon being waged again; the Peace of Amiens had ended in May 1803, and the people of Britain once again slept uneasily. Militias drilled and beacons were prepared. On 17 July Farington recorded: ‘I had the last night the most distinct dream of Invasion … Of seeing the French boats approach in the utmost order, and myself surrounded by them after their landing. I thought they preserved great forbearance not offering to plunder, & that I was in the midst of them some conversing in broken English. It seemed to me that they came upon the Country quite unprepared, and met with no resistance … There was during my dream a sense of great negligence in not being better prepared to receive such an enemy.’¹ Constable was more concerned about the state of the Art and his own place in it. The Academy exhibition that year struck him as ‘very indifferent’ and ‘in the landscape way most miserable’. And yet this state of things intensified a feeling of his own possibilities. He wrote to Dunthorne, ‘I feel now, more than ever, a decided conviction that I shall some time or other make some good pictures. Pictures that shall be valuable to posterity, if I reap not the benefit of them.’ He had enough money to splash out and buy a dozen prints and four drawings by Waterloo and two small landscapes by Gaspar Dughet. (Leslie later noted Constable’s zeal as a collector: ‘If a book or print he wanted came in his way, the chances were he would buy it, though with the money that should pay for his next day’s dinner.’) He noted that R.R. Reinagle was following the latest fad – panorama painting – and would be exhibiting, in the Strand, a view of Rome. The panorama was, Constable observed a shade maliciously, a type of painting that suited Reinagle and kept his defects somewhat hidden. But Constable wasn’t in the main current of things. Talking to some younger artists, he was startled to hear of their admiration for Turner’s work and surprised they thought it by no means extreme.

The Royal Academy meanwhile was gripped by civil war. Some members, including Farington, thought the King had too much influence through patronage. The monarch’s supporters wanted to get rid of Benjamin West, who was not only American by birth but allegedly pro-Napoleon. Rows broke out between members on any pretext – for example on Christmas Eve, during an argument about the giving of gold medals for architecture and sculpture, Sir Francis Bourgeois and Turner furiously slanged each other, Bourgeois calling Turner ‘a little reptile’ and Turner telling Bourgeois he was ‘a great reptile with ill manners’. Constable was out of the way in Suffolk well into the following year, sketching with George Frost ships and warehouses on the Orwell River at Ipswich, the East Anglian corn shipping centre, and making what seems to have been his first drawing of a rainbow. He didn’t exhibit at the Academy in 1804. He told Farington it was futile to compete with mediocrity; he had nothing to gain ‘by putting pictures in competition with works which are extravagant in colour and bad taste, wanting truth.’²

Banking down his own fires but impressing his father with his diligence, he found plenty of local people ready to engage his talents. The small cottage near the Red Lion was his village studio. Portraits painted in the mornings left time for landscapes in the afternoons. The portraits were often life size, head to waist three guineas, head and shoulders two guineas. He told Farington that these low prices allowed the farmers in the vicinity to indulge their ambitions to have their children and other relatives painted.³ Among the families who sat for Constable at this time were the Cobbolds and the Bridges: he sketched Harriet and Sophia Cobbold in Ipswich in 1804 and 1806, and in 1804 he portrayed Mr and Mrs George Bridges and their eight children, arranged around a harpsichord; they lived near Manningtree. He managed to find time now or a little later to paint a portrait of his mother, sitting in an upright armchair with a spaniel on her lap. And he tackled a self-portrait for which he donned a high-collared coat and a cravat. There is just a touch of belligerence in his expression, as if he isn’t sure of the patience of the person he is staring at in the mirror – how long does he want to hold this pose? The self-portrait makes one question Lady Beaumont’s opinion, expressed to Farington this spring of 1804, that Constable ‘seemed to be a weak man’.⁴ (Constable, one recalls, didn’t always agree with everything Sir George Beaumont said.) Difficult, possibly; weak, no.

Constable’s mother, Ann

If there was weakness in any aspect of Constable’s art at this moment, it was manifest in several altarpieces he was talked into by influential local people. Dr Rhudde was rector not only of East Bergholt but of nearby Brantham church and for Brantham Constable painted a tall canvas of Christ blessing the children – a rather sickly picture much indebted to the style of Benjamin West. This, and a painting of Christ blessing the bread and wine, made for Nayland church a few years later at the behest of his well-meaning aunt Mrs Martha Smith, were to be taken as proof by Charles Leslie that Constable – after the Nayland attempt – was wise to stop making ‘incursions into this walk of the art’.⁵ Constable’s uncle, David Pike Watts, thought the artist had used his own brother Golding as a model for the Nayland Christ, and Golding may also have served for the Brantham altarpiece – eyes rolled heavenwards, cheeks almost cosmetically pink.⁶ Otherwise, the fact that Golding’s epilepsy didn’t disqualify him for this role is one element of Constable’s religious ‘incursion’ that we can be less critical about.

The support Constable got from his relatives was lifelong. ‘Doing something for John’ seems to have been a commitment on which the whole family agreed. His mother’s sister Mary Watts married James Gubbins, a surveyor, and Constable was frequently invited to their house at Epsom; there he sketched the Common in early August 1806, and there, several years later, he painted out of doors in oils a landscape of a shallow valley, a long meadow bordered by low escarpments and clumps of trees in thick summer leaf. A happy picture, it marked a moment in which Constable found his own way as a landscape painter. Claude, Rubens, Cozens, Gainsborough – they had served their turn. But around 1806 he may still have received some useful tips from Dr William Crotch, Professor of Music at Oxford and a professional drawing master, who was only a year older than Constable and seems to have given him hints on drawing trees of full bulk. David Pike Watts, a wealthy wine merchant, was a collector of art, Gainsborough included, and in his avuncular way attempted to push forward his nephew’s career. Watts threw Constable and Crotch together at several dinner parties at his house in Portland Place. In return, Constable occasionally passed on to Uncle David news of the art world (and talked to Farington about Watts’s activities). In April 1806 Farington learned from Constable about some trouble Watts was having with Benjamin West.⁷ Watts was interested in a painting West had exhibited in his own gallery but they couldn’t agree a price. Eventually West said he would accept a lower price if Watts kept the sum secret; Watts, offended, declined to buy it under such a constraint. The waves rippling out from this grumpiness apparently reached out to nephew John as a journeyman in what Watts seemed to think was the important but murky world of paintings and painters.

Constable’s reputation as a portraitist had by now reached London. Through Mrs Priscilla Wakefield, the lady who had opened his way to the RA, he spent several weeks in the summer of 1806 with the Hobson family in Tottenham. Markfield House was new, the mansion of William Hobson, a Quaker contractor, who built London docks and coastal defences and fathered sixteen children. In two small calf-bound sketchbooks and on detached sheets Constable sketched the house itself, the Hobson sons and daughters, and various domestic scenes. He also made a coloured pastel sketch of clouds above a barely suggested horizon – a precursor of many sky studies a decade and a half later. Whether a family portrait of the Bridges sort was intended we don’t know – apparently it didn’t come about – but Constable built up a large inventory of Hobson material: a young man lounging; the girls sewing and reading, sitting together and apart, playing a spinet and having tea. One brilliant oil sketch painted by an apparently entranced artist shows a young woman from the rear, a black stole dipping across a red dress that reveals her shoulders, bare back and neck – the vertical furrow in her neck leading the eye up to dark brown hair piled high in a bun.

In the autumn of 1806 David Pike Watts suggested that his nephew might try some pastures new: instead of the Stour valley, the fellsides of the Lake District.⁸ Uncle David would pay his way. Constable stayed with friends of friends and with Watts’s agent, Mr Worgan, who looked after a property Watts owned, Storrs Hall, near Bowness. He toured the rugged countryside with George Gardner, son of David Gardner, the friendly and fashionable portraitist who had painted Constable ten years before and who came from this area. However, George Gardner had less tolerance for the picturesque than his companion and soon went back to Borrowdale, leaving Constable sketching. In seven weeks, not all of fine weather but of dedicated labour, Constable finished nearly ninety drawings and watercolours. At Brathay Hall, at the north end of Lake Windermere, he also made portraits in oils of his hosts Mr and Mrs Harden. John Harden did several drawings of Constable in their music room, attentive to Mr Worgan playing the harpischord and at work on a rainy-day portrait of Jessy Harden, who found Constable ‘a genteel, handsome youth’. (The ‘youth’ was now thirty.)

Did this tour do Constable much good? Certainly the scenery – novel to him – was as close to the thrilling tremors of the sublime as you could find in England. He went to such remote places as Taylor Gill Force, a waterfall in Borrowdale. Many of his sketches were large, on tinted paper, and on many he recorded the date, the weather and particular aspects of the occasion. For example, on one pencil and watercolour view he made the inscription, ‘Borrowdale 2 Sept 1806 morning previous to a fine day.’ Again in Borrowdale on 25 September he wrote: ‘Fine cloudy day, to me very mellow, like the mildest of Gaspar Poussin and Sir G.B … from the eastern slope near Rosthwaite, looking south to Glaramara and the other hills which block the end of the valley.’ On 4 October he noted: ‘Dark Autumnal day at noon … the effect exceeding terrific – and much like the beautiful Gaspar I saw in Margaret Street.’ Later, Charles Leslie recalled hearing Constable say that the solitude of mountains oppressed his spirits. Leslie thought Constable’s ‘nature was peculiarly social … He required villages, churches, farmhouses, and cottages.’⁹ But though Constable never went back to the Cumbrian fells, visiting them was certainly beneficial for him. He might not quite have emulated Thomas Girtin – whom Sir George Beaumont had proclaimed the exemplar of great breadth and truth – yet the Watts-sponsored tour seemed to free him up. A number of the Borrowdale drawings and watercolours have a power until now unseen in his work and an ability to show the bones of the worn mountains poking through their rough skins. On his drawing Esk House of 12 October the son of the Stour valley wrote unloyally, ‘The finest scenery that ever was.’¹⁰ Everything he did here was superior to what his mentor Sir George would have been capable of.

This was country that the Romantic writers claimed for their own. John Keats, staying in the Lake District in 1818, thought the mountains around Borrowdale as fine as anything he had seen. He wrote, ‘I have been very romantic indeed, among these mountains and lakes.’¹¹ Coleridge wrote to a friend in September 1802, soon after climbing Scafell, ‘Nature has her proper interest; & he will know what it is, who believes and feels, that everything has a life of its own, & that we are all one life.’ Constable would have understood Coleridge’s belief that ‘a Poet’s Heart & Intellect should be combined, intimately combined & unified, with the great appearances in Nature – & not merely held in solution & loose mixture with them, in the shape of formal Similes’.¹²

At Old Brathay a neighbour of the Hardens, Charles Lloyd – a minor poet and son of a Birmingham banker – got Constable to paint several members of his family, including his pretty wife Sophia and their child. Lloyd’s sister Priscilla was married to Christopher Wordsworth, a Lambeth vicar and brother of William, and it was through the Lloyds that Constable met the Lake poets, Coleridge and Wordsworth. The latter brought out the sardonic rather than romantic in Constable. Farington wrote in his diary the following year: ‘Constable remarked upon the high opinion Wordsworth entertains of himself. He told Constable that while he was going to Hawkshead school, his mind was often so possessed with images, so lost in extra-ordinary conceptions, that he was held by a wall not knowing but he was a part of it.’ As Constable stood nearby, Wordsworth asked Mrs Lloyd to note the singular formation of his skull, a shape which Coleridge remarked was ‘the effect of intense thinking’. If that was the case, Farington observed, Wordsworth must have started thinking in his mother’s womb.¹³ Keats arrived at a similar verdict, writing in a letter, ‘Wordsworth has left a bad impression where ever he visited in town by his egotism, vanity, and bigotry. Yet he is a great poet if not a philosopher.’¹⁴

This northern excursion of Constable’s was exceptional for the region it took him to but in another respect it came to fit a pattern: if he found it hard to leave home, once away he found it hard to return. Going south in November he called on other members of the Lloyd family to paint portraits and stayed long enough to outwear his welcome. Charles Lloyd wrote from Brathay to his brother Robert in Birmingham, ‘Is Mr Constable gone yet? I do hope he will not become troublesome.’¹⁵ When in the midst of a painting job, Constable had a way of forgetting other engagements; an obsessional concentration seized him, which could be disconcerting for his hosts or his family.

A drawing Constable did of himself in this busy year shows his assurance – a confident profile, aquiline nose, firm chin, long sideburns.¹⁶ He had sent to the RA exhibition a fine watercolour of the Victory sandwiched between two French ships at Trafalgar, the only error being in his subtitle which made E. Harvey (of the Temeraire) rather than T. Hardy the captain of Nelson’s flagship. Back in London from Birmingham he saw a lot of David Wilkie and Benjamin Haydon; they regularly had dinner together at Slaughter’s in St Martin’s Lane. ‘This period of our lives was one of great happiness,’ recorded Haydon, thereafter not often happy. ‘Painting all day, then dining at Old Slaughter’s Chop House.’ Constable’s three entries for the 1807 Academy exhibition sprang from his tour of the Lakes; he told Farington that in one ‘he thought he had got something original’. The paintings attracted his first press notice. The St James’s Chronicle was struck by his View in Westmoreland and wrote that Constable ‘seems to pay great attention to Nature and in this picture has produced a bold effect.’¹⁷ Encouraged by this, Constable asked Farington whether he should put his name in for the Academy elections as a candidate for Associate membership. Thomas Stothard, Academician and brilliant draftsman, had apparently raised the subject with him. Farington told Constable that he wasn’t likely to be elected, ‘but he might put down his name to make [it] familiar to the members’. Farington added rather earnestly that the best impression was made by meritorious works. Constable said that for the present he would decline to put down his name.¹⁸

Self-portrait of 1806

The summer of 1807 saw Constable so busy in London he was unable to get to East Bergholt. An invitation had come from the Earl of Dysart – whose domains included Helmingham Park, a London house in Piccadilly and Ham House in Richmond – to copy family portraits.¹⁹ This was hack work, but reasonably paid, and since some of the paintings being copied were by Reynolds and Hoppner, Constable willy-nilly learned a good deal more about portrait painting. Charles Leslie afterwards said he thought it a pity that these chores kept Constable from painting landscapes, but he certainly got to appreciate Reynolds’s sense of colour and the contrast between light and dark, or chiaroscuro. Moreover, Constable continued to be a keen RA student. Farington on 16 November 1807 heard from the horse’s mouth that Constable was spending every evening at the Life Academy in Somerset House, that he was ‘settled’ as a painter, and that his father was now reconciled to his artistic career. David Pike Watts, whose portrait he had recently painted, also uttered sententious words of approval, declaring that ‘J.C. is Industrious in his profession, Temperate in his diet, plain in Dress, frugal in Expenses … and in his professional character has great Merit’.²⁰ The paragon was among a number of eminent artists Uncle David invited to a dinner party in December 1807. Farington was there, and so were Northcote, West, Stothard, Anthony Carlisle (the RA Professor of Anatomy) and Dr Crotch, the composer and drawing master, in some senses a professional guest since at these Watts dinners he played for a fee. Farington in his diary bit the hand that had fed him by noting that Watts had ‘an habitual reverence for rank & title’. But Watts did his best to grease the ways for his nephew’s advancement in the Art. And Constable showed diplomacy he didn’t always display with his contemporaries by turning the other cheek to Watts’s critical comments on his work – although he had the temerity to say he couldn’t understand why Watts had chosen to live in Portland Place, which hurt his uncle’s feelings. Watts was also unhappy at changes Constable made to the Brantham Christ Blessing the Children; a more finished picture may have resulted but it didn’t interest Watts any more. He said, ‘The mind of the Picture has fled.’ Later, in 1810, Uncle David sent Constable a long letter packed with details of how he might improve his Nayland altarpiece – this had begun as an Agony in the Garden but on Watts’s advice became Christ Blessing the Bread and Wine. The general tone of the letter was as always outspoken but friendly and Constable didn’t let it upset him.²¹ In any event, Mrs Constable congratulated her son on a picture which she hoped would make certain his fame.

Despite his uncle’s help, 1808 didn’t bring Constable any notable accession to fame and fortune. In fact, even with his frugality, he was having trouble making ends meet on what his father gave him. Mrs Constable was apparently asked to use her influence to have the parental allowance boosted without giving Golding Constable reason to demand John abandon his artistic career. Abram, his younger brother, was also an intermediary. He sent on ‘the needful’ cash which Mr Constable now provided and wrote in a letter, ‘You know money comes loath from our Father, & that he thinks any sum a great one.’ Well into 1810 Golding Constable continued to believe that his son was pursuing a shadow in wanting to be a painter, and he wasn’t wrong in thinking that most of the work his son managed to get came from the kindness of friends. John sent – as requested by Abram – a grateful acknowledgement for the money to his father. This got him a pleased thanks from his mother, who also sent some shirts she had made for him; she was concerned about the depth of the cambric frills which fashion seemed to demand and which were deeper than any she had ever made. She had more serious anxieties about Mr Constable’s health: he had a bad cold, shortness of breath, and a troublesome cough, all of which she blamed on his work on the new floodgates at Flatford Mill. Other health news in the village included the prevalence of measles. It had ‘proved fatal only to Mrs Barnard’s little boy, which caused her great vexation’, wrote Ann Constable, ‘but the loss appears as if it would ere long be supply’d’.

Constable was now living in Percy Street off Tottenham Court Road and seems to have been summoned for possible military duty to protect his native soil. But actual service was avoided; a clerk in the Middlesex Militia provided a certificate that he had found a substitute to act for him, one James West.²² It makes one wonder just how accurate was the judgement of Bishop Fisher’s wife at this time in commenting that Constable looked guileless, ‘like one of the figures in the works of Raphael’.²³ Our hero reappeared in East Bergholt in the late summer of 1808 and walked to his favourite sites to once again paint and draw. An oil-on-paper painting of Dedham Vale from Gun Hill with simplified trees and broadly observed meadows seems to date from this time. Plein-air painting was becoming fashionable and even paintings of agricultual scenery were beginning to be seen with less objection. Albeit primarily still ‘only’ a landscape painter, Constable for a change was for once not entirely fighting the tide when he returned to open-air oil sketching.²⁴

Farington continued to encourage him, though sometimes the help took a negative form. On 3 April 1809 the Dictator of the Academy advised Constable not to send in a large painting he had done of Borrowdale, because it looked unfinished. On 28 March 1810 Farington called on Constable ‘& saw 3 Landscapes painted for the Exhibition (rural subjects) & recommended to him to imitate nature & not to be affected by loose remarks of critics’.²⁵ Constable would probably have been glad of any critical notice, but so far the press hadn’t bothered with him much: as noted, only the St James’s Chronicle in 1807 had given him more than a passing mention. But his 1810 submisssions were pruned from three to two. One was a painting of the porch and graveyard of East Bergholt church, showing a group of figures in conversation by a tomb and the porch sundial in bright sunlight – the motto on the dial, Ut umbra sic vita (Life is like a shadow), Constable reserved for a later mezzotint. It was a lovely painting of strong contrasts, and didn’t make a meal of the symbolism of time passing and life’s inevitable end. The other painting he sent in was a landscape which The Examiner described as ‘a chaste, silver toned picture … a singular but pleasing view of water flowing between two trees’. Constable was probably more thrilled by the fact that he sold this picture for thirty guineas to the Earl of Dysart, admittedly his patron as a portrait copyist but also the collector of Reynolds and Gainsborough, and someone recognised by the Ipswich Journal as ‘an advocate for native genius’.²⁶ Constable’s cup no doubt ran over when Farington and Stothard both advised him to put his name in for the next elections of Associates of the Academy. Progress! – or so it seemed until November, when he failed to be elected.

In March 1810 he moved to new accommodation at 49 Frith Street. Among his acquaintances was Henry Monro, a nineteen-year-old RA student and son of Dr Thomas Monro whose patronage and hospitality had assisted many young artists, including Tom Girtin and William Turner.²⁷ Constable was occasionally invited to dinner at Dr Monro’s quarters in the Adelphi, and this gave him a sense of having his foot on an important ladder. He had also been seeing a lot of Wilkie, Haydon and Jackson. Wilkie in particular became a good friend, strolling with Constable to Somerset House, going to the theatre with him, getting Constable to model for him (as the doctor in his painting The Sick Lady), and taking an admiring interest in some of Constable’s sketches.²⁸ Haydon presented a more difficult challenge. Constable felt that Haydon, the self-proclaimed practitioner of High Art, had too much influence over Wilkie. But any long-term friendship between Constable and Haydon had two further obstacles: Constable, despite little initial success, remained devoted to the Royal Academy, while Haydon’s animosity against that institution was growing self-destructive. Friendly relations were further undermined by Haydon’s immense vanity. He once asked Constable why he was so anxious about what he was achieving as an artist. ‘Think,’ said Haydon, his megalomania admitting of only one possible subject of interest, ‘of what I am doing!’²⁹ In April 1809 Haydon – coming up against Constable’s own fierce sense of self-worth – renounced Constable’s acquaintance; he had learned that Constable had been telling people (specifically Northcote) that he had warned Haydon not to belittle John Jackson – another fellow RA student and a portrait-painting protegé of Sir George Beaumont’s. Constable thought Jackson had generously helped Haydon get ahead. Haydon said that he was furious he had allowed Constable to wind himself into his acquaintance. Jackson like Wilkie was a fine talent but – unlike Haydon – modest with it; he wrote to Constable in 1810 hoping that Constable could join him in the New Forest for a couple of weeks of sketching and exploring, and though this invitation went begging, Jackson put Constable up in his Newman Street rooms in 1811 while Constable was looking for new lodgings.³⁰

Constable travelled to various connections and relations in the summer of 1809. He went to Malvern Hall, near Solihull, to stay with Henry Greswolde Lewis, its owner and brother of the dowager Countess of Dysart. There he painted a portrait of Lewis in a cravat and turned-up fur collar and several pictures of the Hall, with rooks flying overhead. (Constable noticed rooks: he later told Bishop Fisher’s nephew John that the cawing of a rook was a ‘voice which instantaneously placed my youth before me’.) His main job at Malvern Hall was to paint a portrait of Lewis’s thirteen-year-old ward, Mary Freer. Apart from the hands and arms, which seem unfinished or have been badly cleaned, this stunning picture makes one feel that Constable could have been one of the best portrait painters of the age, up with Reynolds, Romney and Lawrence. Sitting brush in hand a few feet in front of the vibrant Mary Freer did he feel an echo of another young woman, Maria Bicknell, who had been about the same age as Mary when he first met her? Constable also spent time during the summer with the Gubbinses in Epsom – two of his Gubbins cousins were in the army, as were two of his Watts cousins – and the picture he painted there now showed his growing originality as a landscape artist as well.

The Gubbinses were planning an East Bergholt trip, as were the Whalleys, and Mrs Constable encouraged John to turn up as well, bringing home with him anything that needed mending; new collars and wristbands could be stitched on. She kept him abreast of family news, telling him of the repairs Golding was planning at Dedham Mill ‘for the benefit of succeeders’, i.e. his children. She let John know that the Constable vessel Telegraph was loading at Mistley and that his old headmaster, Dr Grimwood, had died ‘after a fortnight’s severe indisposition’. East Bergholt was much the same as ever, ‘oft times a christening, seldom a burying’, and she hoped a catalogue of the RA exhibition would make its way there by ‘some friendly means!!’ Dunthorne was as impecunious as ever but he and his family were well; his new inn sign for the Duke of Marlborough in Dedham was capital. She made a point of enclosing some cash ‘for travelling extras from an affectionate mother’.

Constable got to East Bergholt that autumn. In early October the weather was fine, good for sketching out of doors. He stayed in Suffolk into December, and his reluctance to leave the village for London was not just because of outdoor sketching or getting together with his old friend Dunthorne. Staying again at the rectory was Dr Rhudde’s granddaughter, Maria Bicknell. The sometimes intimidating rector had been ‘unusually kind & courteous’, according to Constable’s mother in mid-June, even taking a letter from Mrs Constable to her son in London; but Dr Rhudde may not have realised that the reason for Constable’s continued presence in East Bergholt lay in the rector’s household. Nine years had passed since Constable had first met Maria Bicknell, a mere girl, who was now twenty-one. That Constable, thirty-three, took a new and perhaps suddenly amorous interest in her may simply have been because she had become a pretty young woman. Or it may have had to do with the fact that she had rematerialised as such on his own doorstep, just over the hedge that divided the Constable gardens from the rectory land; she was, evidently, an indispensable part of his world. In the next few weeks they met often and strolled together in the wooded gardens of the rectory and the more open gardens of East Bergholt House. They walked through the surrounding fields and along the small stream called the Rhyber. And at some point he told her he loved her.³¹

Was it mere chance that two high points in Constable’s life coincided? Finding out that he loved Maria Bicknell seems to have come together with the end of his long journeyman stage as a landscape painter. Of course, we can’t say which was cause and which effect – it may be that being in love liberated his abilities as an artist; or, perhaps, finally ‘finding himself’ as a painter gave him the confidence to approach Maria as a suitor.