CHAPTER III

HIS LIFE

Constable had a happy, uneventful life and a quiet death. A happy life? Yes. For the loss of friends and the depression of spirits that clouded his closing years are events that happen to not a few who have lived the major portion of their lives pleasantly and successfully. Practical, level-headed, industrious, there is no hint of the aberrations or eccentricities of genius in the orderly and fruitful sixty-one years of his existence, which began in 1776, and ended in 1837.

Probably the severest blow in his life was the death of his wife in 1828, leaving him with seven children. It came, almost without warning, the year after the family had settled so contentedly in Well Walk, Hampstead.

"This house," he wrote, "is to my wife's heart's content; it is situated on an eminence at the back of the spot in which you saw us, and our little drawing-room commands a view unsurpassed in Europe, from Westminster Abbey to Gravesend. The dome of St Paul's in the air seems to realise Michael Angelo's words on seeing the Pantheon; 'I will build such a thing in the sky.'" After his wife's death Constable returned to his former residence in Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square; but he retained Well Walk, and often sojourned there.

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PLATE IV.--FLATFORD MILL ON THE RIVER STOUR.

National Gallery.

Painted in 1817. Constable was then forty-one, a somewhat mature age for a man to produce what may fairly be called his first important work. It is a picture of England--ripe, lush, carefully composed, carefully executed, but fresh as are the meadows on the banks of the Stour; and the sky, across which the large clouds are drifting, is sunny.

[Illustration: PLATE IV.--FLATFORD MILL ON THE RIVER STOUR.]

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Probably the greatest surprise, and certainly one of the most comforting episodes of his life, was the receipt of a legacy of twenty thousand pounds on the death of his wife's father, which elicited the remark that now he could "stand before a six-foot canvas with a mind at ease, thank God!"

Constable developed slowly as a painter, but having once found himself he strode steadily onward, knowing exactly what he meant to do, turning neither to the right nor to the left, indifferent to tradition, schools, and influences. Consequently the earlier years of his life, when he was breaking away from tradition and beginning to see things with his own eyes are the more interesting. He was born at East Bergholt in Suffolk on 11th June 1776, the second son of Golding Constable, owner of water and wind mills. At the Dedham Grammar School he was renowned for his penmanship, and before he left school, at seventeen years of age, he had already shown a strong inclination towards painting. In this he was encouraged by his friend John Dunthorne, plumber and glazier, a man of parts, who devoted his leisure time to landscape painting.

Fate was complaisant to Constable. Born in an opulent and wooded quarter of Suffolk, on a spot overlooking the fertile valley of the Stour, with a friend close at hand who loved Nature and painted her for pleasure not for profit, can we wonder that, later in life, Constable wrote enthusiastically and gratefully of "the scenes of my boyhood which made me a painter." A painter he was from the beginning, for his father's proposal that he should take Orders was never really seriously entertained, and the year that he spent as a miller was surely of more service to him as a student of Nature than if he had spent the period as a student in an art school. As a miller, the "handsome miller" he was called, he learnt at first hand the ways of winds, clouds, and storms; in an art school he would have learned how his predecessors had decided that antique statues should be drawn and "shaded." Yes; everything conspired to make John Constable "a natural painter." The art schools would serve him later, but that year as a miller watching the skies, noting the winds, observing the growth of crops, and the demeanour of trees, was the foundation of his originality. He was but sixteen--that impressionable period when everything is new, and the eyes of body and soul absorb and retain. In that fresh and impulsive sketch called "Spring," now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, he painted, later in life, one of the mills in which he worked, upon the timbers of which he had carved the words "John Constable, 1792." In the second edition of his "Life," published in 1845, Leslie says that the name and date, neatly carved with a penknife, "still remain." Leslie also prints Constable's description of this "Spring" sketch which was engraved by David Lucas.

"It may perhaps give some idea of one of those bright silvery days in the spring, when at noon large garish clouds surcharged with hail or sleet sweep with their broad shadows the fields, woods, and hills; and by their depths enhance the value of the vivid greens and yellows so peculiar to the season. The _natural history_, if the expression may be used, of the skies, which are so particularly marked in the hail squalls at this time of the year, is this...." Then follows a lengthy and intimate study of _the natural history_ of the skies, showing what stores of knowledge he had amassed during the year he worked as a miller. Is it exaggeration to describe that year as the most important of his life. It gave him the independent outlook, the rough intimacy with fields and hedgerows under the influences of light and weather, that new-old knowledge which so astonished the French artists at the Salon of 1824. Constable began with the skies of Nature, he went on to study the skies of Claude, Ruysdael, and other masters; but he returned to the skies and pastures of Nature, never to leave them again.

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PLATE V.--DEDHAM MILL. Victoria and Albert Museum.

Painted in 1820, three years after "Flatford Mill." Constable's father was the owner of the watermills at Flatford and Dedham. Many years before the date of this picture, Constable, writing of a landscape of Dedham by an acquaintance, said--"It is very well painted, and there is plenty of light without any light at all." In "Dedham Mill," he progresses in his purpose to infuse true light into his pictures.

[Illustration: PLATE V.--DEDHAM MILL.]

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Here is a further episode of Constable's youth before he visited London, another example of the luck, there is no other word for it, that attended his art beginnings. The Dowager Lady Beaumont lived at Dedham, where Golding Constable owned a water-mill, and as the families were friendly, Constable early made the acquaintance of her son, Sir George Beaumont, who was twenty-three years his senior. He had already approved of some copies made by the youth in pen and ink after Dorigny's engravings of the cartoons of Raphael, and he had showed him the "Hagar" by Claude, already mentioned, which Sir George always carried about with him when he travelled. What was still more important, he displayed before his protege thirty water-colours by Girtin. The Claude and the array of Girtins produced an enormous impression upon young Constable. In Claude he made acquaintance with an old master, who had been the first to paint pure landscape in the approved grand or classical manner; in Girtin was revealed to him the harbinger of a new epoch in landscape painting, the young Girtin, friend and fellow-student of Turner, who died in 1802 at the age of twenty-seven, and of whom Turner said--"Had Girtin lived, I should have starved."

In 1795 Constable made a tentative visit to London, "for the purpose of ascertaining what might be his chance of success as a painter." He carried with him a letter to Joseph Farrington, pupil of Richard Wilson, who predicted that "his style of landscape would one day form a distinct feature in the art." Constable also made the acquaintance of John Thomas Smith, the engraver, known as "Antiquity Smith," who gave him the following excellent advice, which shows that the revolt against the academic landscape had already begun in England:

"Do not," said "Antiquity Smith," "set about inventing figures for a landscape taken from Nature; for you cannot remain an hour in any spot, however solitary, without the appearance of some living thing that will in all probability accord better with the scene and time of day than will any invention of your own."

That visit to London "for the purpose of ascertaining what might be his chance of success as a painter," would seem to have been encouraging neither to himself nor to his parents. No immediate answer was forthcoming, and while the decision was in abeyance his time was divided between London and Bergholt. It is on record that he worked hard: that he studied Leonardo's _Treatise on Painting_; that he read Hessner's _Essay on Landscape_; and that he painted two pictures--"A Chymist" and "An Alchymist"--of very little merit. Gradually it seems to have been recognised that he was to become not a painter, but a clerk in his father's counting-house. In 1797, at the age of twenty-one, young Constable wrote to "Antiquity Smith":

"I must now take your advice and attend to my father's business ... now I see plainly it will be my lot to walk through life in a path contrary to that in which my inclination would lead me." Poor John! Not even a peep of the skies from the windmill, merely a stool in the counting-house.

This threat of the counting-house stool seems to have been only a temporary menace. His biographer dwells very briefly on those dark disillusioned days. Suddenly the clouds lift, and in 1799 we find him admitted a student of the Royal Academy Schools. His biographer breaks the news dramatically, with the statement--"in the year 1799 he had resumed the pencil, not again to lay it aside." No record is given of the period he presumably passed in his father's counting-house. We know only that at twenty-three years of age he attained his heart's desire. The following passage from a letter written to Dunthorne, on 4th February 1799, inaugurates Constable's career as a painter:

"I am now comfortably settled in Cecil Street, Strand, Number twenty-three. I shall begin painting as soon as I have the loan of a sweet little picture by Jacob Ruysdael to copy." No doubt he learned much from copying Ruysdael and other masters, but Nature was his real tutor. Later in the year he writes from Ipswich:

"It is a most delightful country for a painter. I fancy I see Gainsborough in every hedge and hollow tree." And in 1802 he makes that memorable communication by letter to Dunthorne after a visit to Sir George Beaumont's pictures, to which reference has already been made.

"For the last two years I have been running after pictures, and seeking the truth at second hand ... I shall return to Bergholt, where I shall endeavour to get a pure and unaffected manner of representing the scenes that may employ me ... _There is room for a natural painter_. The great vice of the day is _bravura_, an attempt to do something beyond the truth."

Constable had now thirty-five years of life before him, through which he worked unwearyingly, joyfully, to become a natural painter. Henceforth he was the interpreter of English "cultivated scenery"--pastures and the skies, trees and cottages, the farm-hand, the farm-waggon, the farm-horse, the fugitive rain and the wind that passes. Mountains, the sea, the piled up majestic picturesqueness of Nature did not attract him. In brain, heart, and vision he was essential pastoral England, and never did he better express his innermost feeling than when he wrote:

"I love every stile and stump and lane in the village; as long as I am able to hold a brush, I shall never cease to paint them."

The life of a painter is not usually exciting, and Constable's life was no exception, Here are a few dates. In 1802, at the age of twenty-six, he exhibited his first picture, under the unambitious title "A Landscape," at the Royal Academy; in 1816, at forty, he married; in 1819, at forty-three, he was elected A.R.A.; in 1824, his "Hay Wain" was exhibited at the Salon; in 1828 his wife died; in 1829, at fifty-three, he was elected R.A., and in 1837 he died. The end was sudden. He had been at work during the day on his last picture of "Arundel Mill and Castle," and although his friends noticed that he was not looking well, he was able to go out that evening on an errand connected with the Artists' Benevolent Fund. He retired to bed about nine o'clock, read as was his custom, and when the servant removed the candle by which he had been reading, he was asleep. Later he awoke in great pain, and died within an hour. The post-mortem revealed no indications of disease, and the extreme pain, says Leslie, from which Constable suffered and died could only be traced to indigestion. The vault in the south-east corner of the churchyard at Hampstead where his wife had been buried, and from the shock of whose death he never quite recovered, was opened, and he was laid by her side.

His art was sane and healthy, but his letters show that during the latter part of his life he suffered from depression and morbid fancies.

"All my indispositions," he wrote to Fisher, "have their source in my mind. It is when I am restless and unhappy that I become susceptible of cold, damp, heats, and such nonsense." And, to sum up, Leslie recalls a passage written by Constable ten years before his death, in which, after speaking of having removed his family to Hampstead, he says: "I could gladly exclaim, here let me take my everlasting rest."

But his life was an extremely happy one on the whole; the legacies he received, placed him in comfortable circumstances, and if, outside his own fraternity, his art was but little encouraged, that was the lot of all landscape painters. It is said that he was nearly forty before he sold a landscape beyond the circle of his relatives and personal friends. This was probably the "Ploughing Scene in Suffolk," bought from the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1814 by Mr Allnutt. But to set against this tardy recognition, there was the splendour of the acknowledgments that came later--his gold medal at the 1824 Salon, and the gold medal at Lille in 1825 for his "White Horse." The priced catalogue of the sale of his pictures and sketches after his death shows how enormously the appreciation of Constable has increased. The two magnificent studies for "The Hay Wain" and "The Leaping Horse" now at the Victoria and Albert Museum, were sold in one lot for fourteen pounds ten shillings; "Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop's Garden," went for sixty-four pounds one shilling, and "The Opening of Waterloo Bridge" for sixty-three pounds.

Constable fell under the ban of Ruskin--unjustly, "I have never seen any work of his in which there were signs of his being able to draw" is the opening of an oft-quoted passage; but when _Modern Painters_ was being written, as Mr Sturge Henderson points out, the magnificent collection of Constable's tree studies and sketches, now at South Kensington, were still in private hands. Ruskin could never have taunted Constable with not being able to draw had he examined those studies. Although not a great draughtsman he was certainly a conscientious, competent, and life-long student of drawing.

Constable has now his assured high place in British art. So valuable have his paintings become, that he has long been a prey to the forger and the clever copyist. Mr C. J. Holmes, in his exhaustive and discriminating work on Constable, devotes four pages to an examination of the methods of the forgers. In another appendix he prints a chronological list of Constable's chief pictures and sketches, from 1795, the year of his earliest dated work, "A Study after Claude," to the "Arundel Mill and Castle," exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1837. At the beginning of the record of each year's work there is a line giving the "Places Visited" by Constable during the year. These bare records are like so many windows opening to the country places which Constable loved, where he spent joyous, enthusiastic days; for Constable was never so happy as when he stood with brushes and palette face to face with Nature. Turner was a world traveller--the world of Europe. Constable was a home traveller--the homely stiles, stumps, and lanes of the village. What a vista the following mere record of the Places Visited in 1823 gives: London, Southgate, Suffolk, Salisbury, Gillingham, Sherbourne, Fonthill, Cole-Orton. Can you not see him drawing from each place fresh and dewy inspiration? Not "truth at second-hand": truth direct from the source. And does not the heart respond to Constable's generous enthusiasm for his great contemporary. Here is his testimony to Turner's contributions to the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1828:

"Turner has some golden visions, glorious and beautiful. They are only visions, but still, they are art, and one could live and die with such pictures."

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PLATE VI.--A COUNTRY LANE. National Gallery.

This sketch probably served as the motive for the picture of "The Cornfield." The sobriety of the work places it in a category between the careful construction of the Exhibition pictures and the impetuosity of most of the sketches.

[Illustration: PLATE VI.--A COUNTRY LANE.]

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