EARLY IN THE new year the old King died. The staff of the Royal Academy donned mourning clothes in honour of George III, the deceased founder and patron of their institution. Bishop Fisher in Salisbury was among many who felt someone close to them had departed. Benjamin West, the King’s exact contemporary, said he had lost his best friend – and died too, six weeks later. A cast of West’s painting hand, taken as if holding a brush, was made within an hour of his death, to mark his passing. Whatever his limitations as a painter, West – a celebrity – always encouraged younger artists, including Constable. Encountering him in the street one day in 1812, Constable asked whether West thought he was pursuing his studies so as to lay ‘the foundation of real excellence’. The RA President replied, ‘Sir, I consider you have achieved it.’1 Sir Thomas Lawrence, the fashionable portrait painter, succeeded West as President. George IV, nicknamed Prinny, even more of an art lover than Farmer George, was the new King.
Constable seems to have been a straightforward monarchist and pro-Hanoverian. He took the fourth George’s part against his consort, Caroline, who had left the country as an outraged princess in 1813 and now returned to England to claim her rights as Queen. In July Parliament enacted a bill to deprive her of her title and dissolve the marriage. In London mobs roamed the streets in support of the Queen, demanding illuminations and breaking windows; soldiers had to keep the peace. On 1 September Constable wrote to Fisher from Keppel Street that he was glad he had got his wife and children out to Hampstead: ‘Things do not look well though I fear nothing – but the Royal Strumpet has a large party – in short she is the rallying point (and a very fit one) for all evil minded persons.’ She was also a rallying point for such important opposition figures as William Cobbett – a dangerous radical as far as Constable was concerned. Constable continued, ‘I hear the Duke of Wellington was yesterday in the most imminent danger – & had nearly lost his life by the hands of an Old Woman.’ For Constable, Wellington – barring the bad luck of assassination – was a trustworthy hero.
An ‘old woman’ closer to the artist was one of his father’s sisters, Aunt Martha Smith, aged eighty and slowly declining in Nayland. Constable had been to see her a few months earlier and her eyes had filled with joyful tears when he told her of Minna’s birth and his happiness with Maria. In 1810 she had commissioned Constable to paint the altarpiece for Nayland church and now on her death in January 1820 she left him £400 as the promised payment for this.
Stour scenes figured again in Constable’s Academy campaign of 1820. His two paintings showed the Stour, one upriver at Stratford St Mary, the other at its North Sea mouth. He had sketched children fishing by the Stratford watermill in 1811 and his painting now extended the view to more of the river, a barge and the meadow across the way. The water surface alternates between pools of shadow and reflection; the trees along the left-hand bank are similarly broken up, here sunlit, there in deep shade; the sky’s blue partly covered by stacks of white cloud. As with The White Horse, Constable made a full-size sketch as well as painting his six-footer for Somerset House, and to present taste the sketch is (as with most of his six-footers) livelier than the finished product; in the latter the pains taken seem to reduce the spontaneity and energy. Energy, of course, is part of the subject. A watermill with its side-mounted wheel may now appear merely a picturesque element in a sylvan landscape. But in that time mills – water or wind-powered – worked machinery for grinding, sawing, pumping and pressing. Stratford Mill then made oil (Constable tells us so on the back of a little oil sketch he painted in 1811). Thereafter it was used for the production of paper and macaroni. It would not have seemed as ‘picturesque’ to Constable as to us.
Before sending it in, Constable told Farington he didn’t mean to ‘consult opinions’ about the painting.2 Was he fearful that Farington might talk him into changes he’d regret? Later that year Farington succeeded in convincing Constable to put aside his newly begun painting of the opening of Waterloo Bridge for another big Stour picture. In any event, Stratford Mill was a success at the RA exhibition. It was noticed flatteringly by The Examiner, which dared to brave ‘the jealousy of some professors and of some exclusive devotees of the Old Masters’ by saying that Constable’s picture ‘has a more exact look of nature than any picture we have ever seen by an Englishman’.3 Constable was pleased: viewers were responding to the way he saw landscape. His second, smaller picture (based on a drawing of 1815) showed the lighthouse at Harwich, a sparer, less cluttered and possibly to modern eyes lovelier scene.
Stratford Mill also succeeded in acquiring a buyer, the faithful John Fisher. Early in 1821 he won a court case and bought the picture for one hundred guineas to give to his Salisbury lawyer, John Tinney. Tinney became an ardent fan: he tried to buy at least one further large Constable and several smaller ones, and he put up with frequent requests from the artist to send back Stratford Mill to be exhibited or improved or simply to rest in Constable’s studio once more. Constable, despite having been paid for it, seemed to think it still rightly belonged there, sitting on an easel and impressing visitors. Poor Tinney had to keep asking for the return of his picture. He was taken advantage of until his patience snapped. He had wanted another work from Constable, but Constable masochistically refused to paint one. Tinney’s wants were a burden to him. Constable wrote to Fisher (17 November 1824), ‘I am now free & independent of Tinney’s kind & friendly commissions – these things only harrass me. You know my disposition is this – in my seeming meekness, if I was bound with chains I would break them – and – if I felt a single hair round me I should feel uncomfortable.’ A lot of Constable’s self-acknowledged obduracy is evident here.
At the new King’s birthday dinner in Somerset House on 3 July Sir Thomas Lawrence, the new President, was in the chair at the centre of the long table. Collins was at one end and Turner at the other, with Constable and Samuel Lane to his right. (Farington did a diagram in his diary of the seating arrangements.)4 Constable conversed as well as he could with Lane, using sign language; with Turner he had to cope with the great man’s grunts, sybillic utterances and occasional bursts of brilliance – it helped to be able to hook into Turner’s streams of associated thoughts. Constable and Turner – linked by posterity as the twin masters of nineteenth-century British art – were never friends. Constable said of Turner’s Hannibal in 1812 that he found it ‘scarcely intelligible in many parts’ and yet as a whole ‘novel and affecting’. A year later, in 1813, he dined beside Turner in the RA Council Room with various other exhibitors and, as already noted, wrote to Maria that ‘I always expected to find him what I did – he is uncouth but has a wonderfull range of mind.’ Given that both men were at the forefront of the movement to paint landscape out of doors, both believed poetry and painting were closely connected, both had friends in common like Leslie and heroes in common like Claude – and both were commonly attacked by such critics as John Eagles and were in the end applauded together by Delacroix – it is strange how problematic their acquaintanceship was.5 Constable put on record more compliments about Turner’s work than Turner did of his, Constable referring for example to Turner’s ‘golden visions’ in a letter to Fisher in 1828. But he undoubtedly suffered from working so long in Turner’s shadow. His envy of Turner’s success sometimes showed, as when he called Turner’s book of mezzotint engravings the ‘Liber Stupidorum’. Possibly there were temperamental and even political differences between the more ruthless unmarried London-born artist whose father had been a barber and the Suffolk grain-merchant’s son who had married the daughter of an Admiralty lawyer.
In July 1820 Constable took Maria, John Charles, and Minna to Salisbury to stay with John and Mary Fisher for six weeks. The archdeacon now had one vicarage in Osmington and another at Gillingham, west of Salisbury, as well as Leydenhall his large house in the cathedral close. The cathedral with its great spire, the highest in England according to Defoe, overlooked the well-endowed community of ecclesiastics; and the Constables didn’t complain at being guests there. The White Horse was in the Fishers’ drawing room, hung – Fisher had told the artist in late April – ‘on a level with the eye, the lower frame resting on the ogee: in a western side light, right for the light of the picture, opposite the fireplace. It looks magnificently. My wife says that she carries her eye from the picture to the garden & back again & observes the same sort of look in both.’ Fisher and Constable made sketching trips near and far: down the garden to the River Avon; across the water meadows to West Harnham and the low downs of Harnham Ridge beyond, with its prospect of Salisbury and the cathedral; to Gillingham with its quaint bridge and mill; to the megaliths of Stonehenge; and to Old Sarum, the loaf-shaped hill which had been the site of a fortified camp in earlier times and was still a prime rotten example of parliamentary corruption, being a barely populated ‘borough’ with the right to send two MPs to the House of Commons (Cobbett called it ‘the Accursed Hill’).6 Constable drew and painted both close-at-hand and panoramic views, some with rich detail, others done with quick touches. In one of the sketchbooks the archdeacon wrote down a translation of some Latin lines which Constable later used in the text for a mezzotint of East Bergholt House:
This spot saw the day spring of my life,
Years of happiness and days of Joy.
This place first tinged my boyish fancy
With a love of the art.
This place was the origin of my fame.
But the countryside had more distant views than Suffolk’s, and the skies got his attention differently. He stood just outside the gateway to Fisher’s house and looked across the lush green meadow to the grey-white cathedral spire rising some four hundred feet out of the old trees to brush the clouds: Heaven-aspiring – on a far grander scale than Dedham. When the Constables returned to London in late August, Fisher reminded his friend to paint the eclipse forecast for 7 September. He seemed to know that skies were going to be an increasing part of Constable’s agenda.
Constable sent Maria and the two children up to Hampstead while he attended the life classes at the RA and got on with several paintings. He worked again on his ‘Waterloo Bridge’, which Fisher was encouraging. He made a copy of a Claude for Fisher and painted Leydenhall’s garden and made a sketch of the Cathedral for a picture Bishop Fisher wanted. Wonderful patrons, the Fishers, though the relationship involved having to give ‘the good Bishop’s’ daughter Dorothea copying tips and tolerating the senior Fisher’s quirks. On 3 January 1821 the archdeacon wrote to Constable about the commissioned work: ‘The Bishop likes your picture – “all but the clouds” he says. He likes “a clear blue sky”.’ Constable also had orders for portraits and house-portraits piling up (they included Lady Dysart, the Reverend Thomas Walker – the chaplain of Lincoln’s Inn – and Henry Greswolde of Malvern Hall.)7 Meanwhile, Farington argued that Constable should work on another full-size Stour painting rather than the Waterloo Bridge.8 Part of him was already there on the Essex–Suffolk border: in what was already a very productive year he found time to complete another version of one of his favourite Stour valley subjects, Dedham Mill and Church.
Archdeacon Fisher had several shocks in February 1821. His mother-in-law died suddenly. Then, while in the graveyard discussing with the elderly clerk of Osmington church where she should be buried, the old man exclaimed, ‘I cannot stand, sir!’ and fell dead into Fisher’s arms. When Constable heard of this he wrote to his friend, ‘The poor clerk’s sudden death … must have called for a great exertion of your fortitude and piety.’ He went on to tell Fisher about what obviously meant more to him: the friendship and approbation that kept him going when standing – as he was these days – before a large canvas. ‘I shall never be a popular artist – a Gentlemen and Ladies painter but … your hand stretched forth teaches me to value my own natural dignity of mind above all things.’ Fisher had cheered up three weeks later when he wrote to Constable from Salisbury about Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne. ‘It is a book that should delight you & be highly instructive to you in your art if you are not already acquainted with it. White was the clergyman of the Place & occupied himself with narrowly observing & noting down all the natural occurrences that came within his view: and this for a number of years … It is in your own way of close natural observation: & has in it that quality that to me constitutes the great pleasure of your society.’ Fisher recognised that, like White, Constable had his own specific locale; he painted his own places best.
Constable went at once to Bond Street, to his friend the bookseller James Carpenter, and bought Selborne, first published in 1789. He wrote to Fisher, ‘The single page alone of the Life of Mr White leaves a more lasting impression on my mind than that of Charles the fifth or any other renowned hero – it shows what a real love for nature will do – surely the serene & blameless life of Mr White, so different from the folly & quackery of the world, must have fitted him for such a clear & intimate view of nature … This book is an addition to my estate.’ Twelve years later Selborne was also put into the hands of his son John Charles, who was given his own copy.9
In Hampstead another addition to the Constable estate had just arrived – ‘a beautiful boy’, born on 29 March and christened Charles Golding Constable, after both his grandfathers. According to Constable, Maria had grown ‘unusually large’ this time, but the delivery went well, with Dr Robert Gooch in attendance. Maria was averaging nearly one child a year.
Constable had been working on four entries for the RA annual exhibition: Hampstead Heath, A Shower, Harrow and Landscape: Noon, which was to become known after the most prominent object in it as The Hay Wain. This was his big offering for the exhibition and he had been keeping the archdeacon (and Farington) informed about it. But earlier in the year he had realised that he needed some details about its central feature: the four-wheeled farm wagon, or ‘wain’, which at a late stage he had decided to introduce. The empty wagon was on its way through the shallow millstream to the ford by which it would cross the main river channel, heading for the meadows where haymakers were at work. A fisherman (or boy fishing under a man’s hat) was on the far bank among the grass and reeds, where the bows of a boat could be seen. Perhaps because of the constraints Maria had put on his friendship with John Dunthorne, Constable asked Abram to get Dunthorne’s son Johnny to draw him the ‘outlines of a scrave or harvest wagon’. Johnny, now twenty-three, had a cold job doing this out of doors in February, but according to Abram, Dunthorne Senior – now fifty-one, and with a hernia problem – ‘urged him forward saying he was sure you must want it as the time drew near fast’. Johnny was apparently doing this ‘free from sordid motives’, i.e. without pay, but Abram said he would hand on any recompense Constable cared to give him. At the time in February Abram was ‘extremely apprehensive’ about the state of the painting and thought his brother still had ‘everything to do’ to get it ready by 10 April, when it was to go to Somerset House. And when William Collins saw Landscape: Noon on 9 April, he said he liked it but regretted that Constable had lacked ‘time to enable him to finish the picture more accurately’.10 The sashes of a window on the stairs at Keppel Street had to be removed to get the painting out. When Farington went to the Academy on 1 May, one of the varnishing days, he saw Constable at work putting in final touches. He signed the painting ‘John Constable pinxt London 1821’.
Constable went up to Bergholt in mid-April, leaving Maria, the two older children and the newborn. He took a parcel of hot-cross buns as an Easter gift and told Maria his old haunts were ‘sweet and beautiful’. The trees and blossom were coming out, and swallows were appearing. At the Whalleys’, he felt the urge to live in Dedham too. ‘Here is so much entertainment to be found for the children, & if I was absent you would be near Martha.’ But he encountered his sister Ann in Bergholt in a prickly mood and thought her companion unpleasant. Maria had her own family problems. Her brother Sam died from consumption on 22 May and her sister Catherine had ‘many bad symptoms’, and looked likely to follow him (she died about four years later).
Then it was into the fray at Somerset House, into what Fisher called ‘the crowded copal atmosphere of the Exhibition: which is always to me like a great pot of boiling varnish’. Constable was pleased with his big landscape, though unusually for him with a new painting he didn’t claim it as his best to date. He told Fisher it wasn’t ‘so grand’ as Stratford Mill, ‘the masses not being so impressive – the power of the Chiaro Oscuro is lessened – but it has rather a more novel look than I expected’. And several critics were enthusiastic. Robert Hunt in The Examiner said that Landscape: Noon approached ‘nearer to the actual look of rural nature than any modern landscape whatever’. The Observer thought it deserved a high place and admired the ‘fine freshness’ of its colouring, and Bell’s Weekly Messenger approved but added, ‘Why all that excess of piebald scambling [sic] in the finishing, as if a plasterer had been at work …? The Artist may say, “I intend what I paint always to be viewed at a certain distance, you will then get rid of my white spots.” This is certainly an affectation and trickery of art unknown to our best painters.’11 What one saw as Constable’s ‘sparkle’ was to another Constable’s ‘spottiness’ – and in time more would be heard on that score.
Among the visitors to the Academy exhibition were two from France: Théodore Géricault, one of the leaders of the French avantgarde, and the writer-critic Charles Nodier. Géricault, who had brought The Raft of the Medusa to exhibit privately in London, was overwhelmed by The Hay Wain. And Nodier mentioned only one painting in an essay he wrote on his trip to Britain:
The palm of the exhibition belongs to a large landscape by Constable, with which the ancient or modern masters have very few masterpieces that could be put in opposition. Near, it is only broad daubings of ill-laid colours, which offend the touch as well as the sight, they are so coarse and uneven. At the distance of a few steps it is a picturesque country, a rustic dwelling, a low river whose little waves foam over the pebbles, a cart crossing a ford: It is water, air, and sky; it is Ruysdael, Wouvermans or Constable.12
No one bought the painting at Somerset House. Constable exhibited it again at the British Institution in January 1822 with a price of 150 guineas; it was seen by a French art dealer with a British name, John Arrowsmith, who went to Keppel Street to call on Constable and offer him £70 for the painting, ‘without the frame’. The artist said no to this, though he claimed he needed the money ‘dreadfully’. Whether Abram was having difficulties paying sums due to family members because of the prevailing agricultural depression, we don’t know, but Constable’s friend and major patron John Fisher was also strapped. Constable said the painting of The Hay Wain had impoverished him and asked his friend to lend him twenty or thirty pounds – Fisher sent five pounds, all he could afford. The archdeacon also took Constable along in early June to sketch while he visited rural deaneries. What Maria thought about being left with the new baby and two small children, while Constable took this fortnight-long working holiday, we have to assume; judging from later, similar occasions, her patience wasn’t infinite; on the other hand, perhaps she was now grateful not to be bothered in bed by her loving husband. Fortunately she had to assist her a ‘treasure’, a nurse/governess/family-help named Elizabeth Roberts – nicknamed ‘Bobs’ or ‘Old Lady Ribbons’ – whose devotion to the Constables was demonstrated over many years.13
Yet Constable always missed home terribly and came back repenting his absence. He quickly decided Maria needed country air again – having been stuck in Keppel Street – and it was briefly back to Hampstead, to a house in Lower Terrace rented for four guineas a week, furnished. He wrote to Fisher on 3 November: ‘The last day of Octr was indeed lovely so much so that I could not paint for looking – my wife was walking with me all the middle of the day on the beautifull heath.’ Out on the Heath he found a new subject for painting, but he also now had to address a number of traditional chores. He was commissioned to paint an altarpiece for the church in Manningtree, a few miles east of Bergholt, where the Stour opens out into an estuary; it was ‘a job’ that would help meet the expenses of his expanding family and two homes. Salisbury continued to vie with the Stour, however, and in early November when his family was moving down to Keppel Street he joined Fisher again for a week or so, drawing the cathedral and the close, and visiting Winchester with its cathedral. Compared to Salisbury, he found it ‘more impressive but not so beautifull’. And he wrote to Maria with his passionate regrets: ‘Kiss my darlings … I am quite home sick (perhaps love sick) … I am uncomfortable away so long.’
Back in Keppel Street he worked on his next painting for Somerset House, a six-footer; it was a view on the Stour centred on some barges being moved just below the footbridge at Flatford. Farington was one of his chief supporters in this field – he felt big Stour pictures should be Constable’s way ahead – but on the penultimate day of 1821 the ‘Dictator’ of the Academy ceased to matter. Descending from the gallery of a church near Manchester he fell and died. Farington was therefore not available to support Constable’s candidacy for full RA membership in February 1822, when one place went to Richard Cook (who had given up exhibiting three years before but married well) and another to William Daniell whose uncle was the Academician Thomas Daniell. Literally nepotism.