THE ‘DREADFUL BOOK’ was one means by which Constable hoped to make a claim for landscape painting, and his role in it. A second method now appeared. In mid-June 1833 he delivered his first lecture on the subject. He wrote to Leslie a few days before: ‘Remember I play the part of Punch on Monday at eight, at the Assembly Room, Hampstead.’ The audience were members of the Literary and Scientific Society of Hampstead; the lecture was entitled ‘An Outline of the History of Landscape Painting’. No exact transcript of the talk (or its successors) exists, though Constable made notes for them and, after the first occasion, an abstract of what he remembered he had said. The lectures expressed the obligation he had once written to David Wilkie about – his need ‘to tell the world there is such a thing as landscape existing with Art’ because he had so far largely ‘failed to show the world that it is possible to accomplish it’.1 Perhaps he remembered what John Fisher had said to him seven years before when Henry Phillips, the Brighton botanist, asked him to write a paper for his proposed literary magazine. Fisher had suggested that Constable put down in a book his thoughts on painting, on his life and his opinions, and set about it without delay.2
Fisher of course was no longer alive but Leslie was on hand in George Romney’s old house3 to hear Constable getting to grips with the matter, the substructure of art that distantly underpinned his own painting. Constable had brought along reproductions of works he was going to mention; he had asked Lucas to help him find a large copy of The Mill, thought to be by Rembrandt, that Samuel Reynolds, Lucas’s teacher, had engraved. Constable evidently failed to live up to his self-characterisation as Mr Punch. One lady house guest of the Purtons was there and – according to the speaker – ‘fell in love with my lecture’. He began modestly, suggesting that the committee of the society be exonerated for choosing so inefficient a speaker. He wanted to trace the history of landscape – to separate ‘this department of art’ from ‘the mass of historical art in which it originated’, and show how ‘it became a distinct and separate class of painting, standing alone’. Early landscapes were painted on the walls of Herculaneum, ‘part of their arabesques’, with ‘trees, like candelabra, formally spread on a plain blue sky’. Pliny claimed that something like chiaroscuro was understood at this time, but Constable saw no evidence of this in the landscapes of the period. In any event, in the early Middle Ages ‘all was lost … in the general wreck of Europe’. The Bayeux Tapestry was ‘little better than a Mexican performance’. When illuminated manuscripts represented Christ’s agony in the garden of Gethsemane, they showed the place ‘only by a flower or flower pot, the rest of the field of the picture being dark’. But this, however rude and imperfect, was the origin of landscape painting. And in its infancy the art was ‘nursed in the hands of men who were masters of pathos’ – Cimabue and Giotto, followed by Ghirlandaio, Barnardo, Uccello, and eventually Raphael. ‘Thus was landscape cradled in the lap of history … and it thus gained a strength and a dignity which has never since wholly forsaken it.’4
The early German and Netherlandish painters came next in Constable’s pantheon, among them Dürer and Lucas van Leyden, but it was in Venice that he found ‘the heart of colour’. Thence landscape spread its future excellence throughout Europe. The Bellini brothers schooled Giorgione and Titian in ‘a servile manner’ but a true way nevertheless, to judge by the result: at their best, Giorgione and Titian ‘never lost their respect for nature’ or wandered ‘into the vacant fields of idealism’. Constable took Titian’s 1520 painting showing the martyrdom of Peter the Dominican as an admirable union of history and landscape; he hadn’t seen more than a print of it but judged from ‘the level and placid movement of the clouds … seen under the pendent foliage of the trees which overhang the road’ that the attack on the monk occurred towards evening. Time of day always mattered with Constable. He dealt next with Annibale Carracci and Domenichino, with Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain, and a ‘more minute imitation of particular nature’. Claude’s ‘chief power consisted in uniting splendour with repose, warmth with freshness, and dark with light’. There followed the romantics Salvator Rosa and Sébastien Bourdon, the first wild and terrific, the second more visionary. Constable later quoted Sir George Beaumont on Bourdon: ‘He was the prince of dreamers, yet not without nature.’5
This remark was in an expanded recapitulation of his Hampstead talk that formed four lectures he gave – at the suggestion of John Charles’s chemistry professor, Professor Michael Faraday – at the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street in May and June 1836. He sent Leslie an invitation with the message: ‘I enclose a card of the Royal Institution that you may be convinced of my folly … but I have not yet commenced making spruce beer in the streets like RAs of our neighbourhood.’ In these lectures – which he made without fee – Constable moved on to Rubens, Rembrandt, and Ruysdael. Rubens’s rainbows and ‘dewy light and freshness’ greatly appealed to him, as did Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro, ‘that power which creates space’. He showed his audience copies of some Ruysdaels: one was of the mouth of a Dutch river, ‘without a single feature of grandeur in the scenery; but the stormy sky, the grouping of vessels, and the breaking of the sea, make the picture one of the most impressive ever painted … We see nothing truly till we understand it. An ordinary spectator at the mouth of the river, which Ruysdael has here painted, would scarcely be conscious of the existence of many of the objects that conduce to the effect of the picture.’ His own awareness he further demonstrated with another Ruysdael – what Leslie called ‘a small evening winterpiece’ – that represented the beginning of a thaw. The once-apprentice miller observed:
The ground is covered with snow, and the trees are still white; but there are two windmills near the centre; the one has the sails furled, and is turned in the position from which the wind blew when the mill left off work; the other has the canvas on the poles, and is turned another way, which indicates a change in the wind; the clouds are opening in that direction, which appears by the glow in the sky to be the south … and this change will produce a thaw before the morning. The concurrence of these circumstances shows that Ruysdael understood what he was painting.
In 1812 a print of the ‘shoar at Skeveling by Ruisdael’ that pleased Constable greatly was hanging in the room in his parents’ house at East Bergholt from which he was writing to Maria. To Leslie, Constable had once praised a Ruysdael which seems to have been a direct progenitor of his own works: ‘It haunts my mind, and clings to my heart, and stands between you and me while I am talking to you; it is a watermill; a man and a boy are cutting rushes in the running stream (the tail water); the whole so true, clear, and fresh, and as brisk as champagne, a shower has not long passed …’6
One or two Dutch painters didn’t make the grade with him. After his second Royal Institution lecture, Constable wrote to his friend William Purton about the reception of the first: ‘Faraday said it pleased him – Sir Martin [Shee] and [Thomas] Howard liked it … I trust you will follow me through my sermons … I hope to murder Both and Berchem on Thursday next at quarter to four o’clock.’7 He disliked Nicolaes Berchem’s ‘bastard style of landscape’ which was ‘wretched art … produced under the very worst stimulus’. This remark caused one collector in the packed audience to ask Constable afterwards if he should sell his Berchems. Constable said, ‘No, sir, that would only continue the mischief. Burn them.’8
Yet generally the Dutch moved and haunted him. The works of Jan Steen and Pieter de Hooch for instance seemed ‘put together almost without thought; yet it would be impossible to alter or leave out the smallest object, or to change any part of their light, shade or colour, without injury to their pictures – a proof that their art is consummate’. There had been the copy of a de Hooch that Leslie had sent him after Fisher’s death, showing a room with a shaft of sunlight falling on the floor, and Constable’s praise: ‘How completely has he overcome the art, and trampled it underfoot, yet how full of art it is.’ At the Royal Institution he summed up the Low Country artists: ‘The Dutch painters were a stay-at-home people – hence their originality … We derive the pleasure of surprise … in finding how much interest the art, when in perfection, can give to the most ordinary subjects.’ Cold critics might wish the Dutch artists told more elevated stories, but those they chose to tell were ‘told with an unaffected truth of expression that may afford useful lessons in the treatment of the most sublime subjects’.9
Constable found the start of the eighteenth century much less enticing. The ‘French taste’ was emasculated. Vernet was offensive and the landscapes in Boucher were the pastoral equivalent of the opera house. Boucher told Sir Joshua Reynolds that ‘he never painted from the life, for … nature put him out’. Then David and his contemporaries produced art which sprang from the terrible Revolution: ‘stern and heartless petrifactions of men and women, with trees, rocks, tables, and chairs, all equally bound to the earth by a relentless outline, and destitute of chiaroscuro, the soul and medium of art’. In England, the eighteenth century had been full of similar degradation until Hogarth, Wilson, and Reynolds came along. Wilson struck Constable as a particularly reviving spirit: he opened ‘the way to the genuine principles of landscape in England; he appeared at a time when this art, not only here, but on the Continent, was altogether in the hands of the mannerists … He looked at nature entirely for himself … [but he] might have starved had he not been appointed librarian to the Royal Academy.’ The Stour valley now figured in Constable’s account. Gainsborough had been born in Sudbury, ten miles inland from East Bergholt, and both his art and his character were appealing. In his landscapes Constable discovered ‘the stillness of noon, the depths of twilight, and the dews and pearls of the morning’. They were the canvases of a ‘most benevolent and kind-hearted man’. (Constable at some point bought in a Suffolk junk shop a plaster horse which Gainsborough had modelled, a ‘tired old horse’, but a treasure.) He concluded his roll of honour with Cozens and Girtin, stressing that he had tried ‘to draw a line between genuine art and mannerism, but even the greatest painters have never been wholly untainted by manner. – Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not landscape painting be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments?’10
Earlier it had been ‘Painting is but another word for feeling’. This ‘Painting is a science’ may have been less a recantation than a nod to the times, to his own increased interest in geology, to John Charles’s interests, and to some of the scientists in his large audience. Over the four lectures, the number of his Royal Institution listeners averaged 233.11 (NB: the Hampstead group which heard his sermons was from the Hampstead Literary and Scientific Society.) Wordsworth was among the celebrities invited to Albemarle Street, and Samuel Rogers, the banker-poet, gave Constable advice on presenting his talks.12 Leslie made memoranda at some of the lectures and later acquired Constable’s notes for others. But Constable told his friend before the second Hampstead lecture in July 1836, ‘I have written little and I certainly shall depend on being conversational.’13 Of the occasion itself Leslie remembered that ‘the sky was magnificent … As I walked across the West End fields to Hampstead, towards evening, I stopped repeatedly to admire its splendid combinations and their effects over the landscape, and Constable did not omit in his lecture to speak of the appearances of the day.’14
To Boner, then in Germany, he wrote of this lecture, ‘It went off immensely well. I was never flurried – only occasionally referring to notes – spoke what I had to say off hand – was an hour and a half – and was “novel, instructive and entertaining,” as the committee … told me.’ He added, ‘Mr G[eorge] Young [the surgeon] was there and said I had much in me to make a lecturer – & he gave me a few lessons & will continue his hints. He said I had the main thing – I could command my audience.’15 Leslie thought his friend an interesting speaker – constantly referring to the pictures he had brought along and indeed better impromptu than when reading from a text. ‘Many of his happiest turns of expression were not to be found in his own notes, they arose at the moment, and were not to be recalled by a reporter unskilled in shorthand.’ Leslie was charmed by Constable’s voice, though it was pitched ‘somewhat too low’, and by the play of ‘his very expressive countenance’ and his off-the-cuff felicities.16
In October 1835 he went to Worcester to deliver his ‘sermons’, this time three in number. He wrote to Lucas, ‘who would ever have thought of my turning Methodist preacher … but I shall do good, to the Art for which I live’. To his host in Worcester he expressed some reservations: ‘I feel myself in the situation of the lobster as very pleasant at first, but as the water got hotter and hotter, was sadly perplexed.’ But he later told Boner that he performed with éclat. He struck a personal note in his survey of landscape painting by mentioning his Suffolk origins and first job as a miller. He was annoyed by the Worcester Guardian’s report, which ‘mangled and mixed up’ his remarks, although ‘it was all well meant’.17 While in Worcester he went out to Bewdley to stay overnight at Spring Grove, the home of Maria’s half-sister Sarah, formerly Mrs Skey, who had married a clergyman. It was twenty-three years since he was there, wooing Maria.
His third and last Hampstead lecture took place on 25 July 1836. He meandered around many loosely related topics, among them the effects of patronage, the bad habits of mannerists, how to draw from nature, the growth of trees and the contemplation of scenery. His illustrations for what he had to say about trees included a drawing of a tall and elegant ash which had stood near the road into Hampstead and according to Constable ‘died of a broken heart’, with a sign directed against vagrants attached to it by two long spikes ‘driven far into her side’. (For him the tree was feminine.) He quoted from two poets, Thomson and Milton, and declared:
There has never been an age, however rude or uncultivated, in which the love of landscape has not in some way been manifested. And how could it be otherwise? For man is the sole intellectual inhabitant of one vast natural landscape. His nature is congenial with the elements of the planet itself, and he cannot but sympathize with its features, its various aspects, and its phenomena in all situations. We are no doubt placed in a paradise here if we choose to make it such …
And towards the end: ‘We exist but in a Landscape and we are the creatures of a Landscape.’18
Compared to Turner – whose last disjointed lecture at the Academy as Professor of Perspective had been given in 1828 – Constable seems a model of lucidity. He obviously put a lot into his talks. He borrowed pictures to use at them and got back from his cousin Jane Inglis a copy he had made from Claude. He borrowed books, such as Bryan’s Dictionary from William Carpenter in order to find out more about John Cozens. Samuel Rogers lent others to him. His painter’s library was increased for research purposes, though his authorities were not always impeccable, and as a stay-at-home artist unfamiliar with Continental collections he had to depend on prints of many old master paintings. Constable the lecturer was much more conventional than Constable the painter, his lecturing style somewhat stilted and ponderous. Although much in his discourses now sounds like received wisdom, a lot of it may have shocked his contemporaries, followers of the Taste and the portraitists and history painters who were the majority of RAs and the critics who applauded them. The wisdom only became received because of Constable and those who eventually saw things his way. He was overcritical of Boucher, whose landscape-as-fantasy didn’t appeal to this inhabitant of the natural landscape. But he ploughed his own memorable furrow. For example, ‘What were the habits of Claude and the Poussins? Though surrounded with palaces filled with pictures, they made the fields their chief places of study.’ And on Mannerists: ‘To this species of painting belong the works that have filled the intervals between the appearances of the great artists. They are productions of men who have lost sight of nature …’, men who were sometimes talented, sometimes feeble: Wouwerman, Berchem, Both, Vernet, Loutherbourg; Jacob More, Philipp Hackert … Ultimately, Constable declared:
Manner is always seductive. It is more or less an imitation of what has been done already – therefore always plausible. It promises the short road, the near cut to present fame and emolument, by availing ourselves of the labours of others. It leads to almost immediate reputation, because it is the wonder of the ignorant world. It is always accompanied by certain blandishments, showy and plausible, and which catch the eye … As manner comes by degrees … all painters who would be really great should be perpetually on their guard against it. Nothing but a close and continual observance of nature can protect them from the danger of becoming mannerists.
His sermon was perhaps intended not just for his audience but for himself.19