CHAPTER V
HIS PICTURES
In one of his letters, dated 1799, Constable refers to "a sweet little picture by Jacob Ruysdael I am copying." He was then twenty-three years of age, a devoted admirer and student of his predecessors in landscape, and able, strange as it may seem to us, to call a Ruysdael sweet. In the style of the old masters he continued working until he was nearly forty, learning from them how to construct a picture, and "acquiring execution" as he expressed it. A methodical man was John Constable, a builder who spared no trouble to make his foundations sound; but during those years of spade work in his voluntary apprenticeship, he never disregarded his determination to become a natural painter. It was his custom to study and copy the old masters during his sojourn in London, but to paint in his own original way, directly from Nature and in the open air, when in the country. An early result of "being himself" during holiday time was the "Dedham Vale" oil sketch of 1802, now at South Kensington, a careful, reposeful picture with trees rising formally at the right, and the church tower visible just beyond the winding river. He utilised this sketch for the large picture exhibited, under the same title, in 1828. The influence of other painters such as the Dutch landscape men, Gainsborough and Girtin, may be traced in many of his pictures produced in the opening years of the nineteenth century when he was "acquiring the execution" on which he based his originality. He also painted portraits; indeed at one time he proposed to live by portrait painting. During 1807 and the next few years he produced several, notably Mr Charles Lloyd of Birmingham and his wife, which Mr C. J. Holmes describes as "amateurish and uncertain in drawing and execution." But there was nothing amateurish or uncertain about the "Portrait of a Boy," which I have lately seen, a ruddy country boy, clad in pretty town-like clothes, an honest, direct, rich piece of work, without a hint of affectation, just the vision of the eye set down straightforwardly. And the foxgloves that stand growing by the boy's right hand are painted as honestly as the striped pantaloons that this open-air boy wears. Just the kind of portrait that John Constable would have painted. He also produced two altarpieces--in 1804, a "Christ Blessing Little Children" at Brantham Church, Suffolk; and in 1809, a "Christ Blessing the Elements" at Nayland Church.
Eight years later, in 1817, he painted "Flatford Mill on the Stour," No. 1273 in the National Gallery, which forms one of our illustrations. Constable was then forty-one, a somewhat mature age for a man to produce what may fairly be called his first important picture. But all his past life had been a preparation for this photographic, pleasant transcript of English scenery. Nothing is left to the imagination, everything is stated, every inch of canvas is painted with equal force, yet what an advance it is upon most of the classical landscapes then in vogue. 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. This picture was bought in at the Constable sale, held the year after his death, in 1838, for the very modest sum of thirty-three guineas.
"The White Horse," called also "A Scene on the River Stour," exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1819, which is now in the possession of Mr Pierpont Morgan, was one of Constable's early successes. It attracted "more attention than anything he had before exhibited," and was bought for one hundred guineas, "exclusive of the frame," by Archdeacon Fisher, who wrote on 27th April:--"'The White Horse' has arrived; it is hung on a level with the eye, the frame resting on the ogee moulding in a western side light, right for the light in the picture. It looks magnificently." "The White Horse" realised one hundred and fifty guineas at the Constable sale, and in 1894, fifty-six years later, was bought by Messrs Agnew for six thousand two hundred guineas.
With "The White Horse" Constable also sent to the British Gallery a picture called "The Mill," which is supposed to be identical with the "Dedham Mill, Essex," at the Victoria and Albert Museum. 1819 was a successful year for Constable, a golden year. He was summoned to Bergholt to receive the four thousand pounds he had inherited from his father; in this year Mrs Constable also inherited four thousand pounds; and he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy. It was in this year while at Bergholt that he wrote to his wife from a grateful and overflowing heart a letter of which the following is an extract:--"Everything seems full of blossom of some kind, and at every step I take, and on whatever subject I turn my eyes, that sublime expression of the Scriptures, 'I am the resurrection and the life,' seems as if uttered near me." There spoke the true landscape painter, the man of deep feeling, conscious that in his painting he was interpreting God's handiwork, and expressing in his chosen medium the miracle of growth, the eternal movement of Nature from birth to re-birth. When standing in that hall at the Victoria and Albert Museum devoted to his achievement--growth, growth, growth--from pencil sketch to completed picture, there are moments when those words of his seem uttered near to us.
"Dedham Mill" may look to our spoilt modern eyes a little tame, but detach yourself from the present, drift into harmony with the picture, and you may perhaps invoke the spirit of the dead man who saw temperate beauty in this scene of his boyhood, and who tried to state his love and gratitude laboriously with paint and brushes--poor tools to express the living light and life of Nature.
Two years later, in 1821, at the age of forty-five, he painted "The Hay Wain," to which I have referred at length in the opening chapter. Perhaps some day when the re-organisation of the National Collections is complete, it will be found possible to hang the brilliant full-sized sketch of "The Hay Wain" now at South Kensington alongside the finished picture in the National Gallery. In the rough magnificent sketch you will observe that he had already begun to use the palette-knife freely in putting on the colour, a practice to which he became more and more addicted.
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PLATE VIII.--SALISBURY.
National Gallery.
A preliminary study, without the rainbow, for the large picture of "Salisbury from the Meadows," exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1831. It is larger than his usual sketches, but shows no anxiety. The hand following the eye stopped when the vision of the eye was recorded, when all the hurry of the wet glitter of the scene had been stated in broken pigment.
[Illustration: PLATE VIII.--SALISBURY.]
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"The Hay Wain" established his fame; but Constable was not the man to sit down under success and repeat his triumphs in one particular method. In the interval between the painting of "The Hay Wain" and its exhibition in Paris, he produced "Salisbury from the Bishop's Garden," now in the South Kensington collection, wherein he attempted to represent the glitter of sunlight by spots of pure pigment which his friends called "Constable's snow." To us, accustomed to modern pictures of sunlight, the "spots and scumbles of pure pigment" in "Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop's Garden" are hardly noticeable, but in 1823 they were an innovation, although not altogether a new discovery. Pinturicchio, in his frescoes in the library of Siena Cathedral, experimented in pointillism, and you may trace it, too, in some of the pictures by Vermeer of Delft. "Salisbury from the Bishop's Garden" gave Constable considerable trouble. He was ill and his children were ill. "What with anxiety, watching, nursing, and my own indisposition, I have not see the face of my easel since Christmas, and it is not the least of my troubles that the good Bishop's picture is not yet fit to be seen." Later he describes "Salisbury from the Bishop's Garden" as "the most difficult subject in landscape I ever had upon my easel," adding that it "looks uncommonly well," and that "I have not flinched at the windows, buttresses, etc., but I have still kept to my grand organ colour, and have, as usual, made my escape in the evanescence of the Chiaroscuro."
"The Lock," another of his well-known pictures, was purchased from the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1824 by Mr Morrison for "one hundred and fifty guineas, including the frame." The superb oil sketch for "The Lock" was sold at Christie's in 1901 for nineteen hundred guineas. It is an upright picture of sunshine and gusty wind, and represents a lock-keeper opening the gates for the passage of a boat. "My 'Lock'" wrote Constable to Fisher, "is liked at the Academy, and indeed it forms a decided feature, and its light cannot be put out, because it is the light of Nature, the mother of all that is valuable in poetry, painting, or anything else where an appeal to the soul is required.... But my execution annoys most of them, and all the scholastic ones. Perhaps the sacrifices I make for lightness and brightness are too great, but these things are the essence of landscape, and my extreme is better than white-lead and oil, and dado painting." Probably no other landscape painter has expressed the intention of his art as clearly in writing as with his brushes. Light! The light of Nature! The mother of all that is valuable in painting! That was Constable's secret--the knowledge of light, a secret that was hidden from the eyes of worthy Sir George Beaumont.
"The Leaping Horse" of 1825, to which reference has already been made, called by some his "grandest painting," reposes in the Diploma Gallery at Burlington House. Several changes were made in the picture after its exhibition at the Royal Academy, which the curious can verify by a study of the full-sized sketch at South Kensington. From this year onward the movement of Nature and the brilliancy of objects in sunlight intrigued him more and more, although his passion for light never reached the white-hot fervour of Turner in his latter years. For Turner the sunrise, a world almost too beautiful and evanescent to be real; for Constable the noonday glow, the still heat haze, seen between cool, dark trees, hovering over a field of ripe corn, as in "The Cornfield," painted when he was fifty--a typical Constable. Constable was pleased with "The Cornfield." Writing of it to Fisher he said: "It is not neglected in any part; the trees are more than usually studied, well defined as well as the stems; they are shaken by a pleasant and healthful breeze at noon
'While now a fresher gale Sweeping with shadowy gusts the fields of corn....'"
This picture, perhaps the best known and most popular of his works, was presented to the National Gallery in 1837, by an association of gentlemen, who purchased it of the painter's executors. Some of them wished to substitute for this gift the fine "Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows" with the rainbow, of which the "Salisbury," No. 1814, in the National Gallery, is a study, but "the boldness of its execution" we are told "stood in its way," and the "Cornfield" was purchased instead. The association of gentlemen need not have been apprehensive that the "boldness of the execution" of "Salisbury from the Meadows" would have frightened succeeding generations. The Munich Secessionists would call it commonplace, and the most old-fashioned member of the selecting committee of a current Royal Academy Exhibition would see in it only a fine picture, forcibly painted but too insistent on detail. The landscape point of view has changed since 1837.
The magnificent "Opening of Waterloo Bridge" which, to those who had not seen it in Sir Charles Tennant's collection, came as a revelation when shown at the Old Masters' Exhibition, gave Constable continuous trouble and anxiety. He was years over it, and "he indulged in the vagaries of the palette-knife to an excess." It was not understood: it was not liked. "Very unfinished, sir," was the comment of his friend, Thomas Stothard, R.A.; and, says Leslie, "the picture was generally pronounced a failure." This brilliant presentation of the King embarking at Whitehall stairs, the water dancing, the air fluttering with gay banners and the sails of bright and sumptuous barges, was hung next to a grey sea-piece by Turner, who promptly placed a bright spot of red lead in the foreground of his own grey picture. The vivacity of Constable's river fete lost something by that spot of vivid red. "Turner has been here and fired a gun," said Constable. The flash remained, although "in the last moments allowed for painting, Turner glazed the scarlet seal he had put upon his picture, and shaped it into a buoy." Considerable doubt has been thrown on Leslie's statement "that soon after Constable's death the picture was toned to the aristocratic taste of the period by a coat of blacking." The picture bears no trace of a coat of mourning.
In the somewhat solemn and simple "Valley Farm," painted in 1835, two years before his death, Constable returned to the scenes of his boyhood, to Willy Lett's house on the bank of the Stour. His hand and eye have lost something of their grip and freshness, but his purpose is as firm as ever. "I have preserved God Almighty's daylight," he wrote, "which is enjoyed by all mankind, excepting only the lovers of old dirty canvas, perished pictures at a thousand guineas each, cart grease, tar, and snuff of candle." The old Adam, you perceive, was still strong in him.
"The Cenotaph," now in the National Gallery, was exhibited in the Royal Academy of 1836--the subject being the cenotaph erected by Sir George Beaumont in memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds, a tribute of affection and respect. It is somewhat heavy in treatment. Did Constable, I wonder, realise that his work was nearly done? Was the uninspiriting "Cenotaph" in his mind when, in the autumn of this year, he wrote so generously about the pictures that his great contemporary was exhibiting:--"Turner has outdone himself; he seems to paint with tinted steam, so evanescent and so airy."
Constable's last work was "Arundel Mill and Castle," upon which he was engaged on the day of his death, 31st March 1837.
His pictures are familiar to many who have not seen all the originals, through David Lucas's mezzotints. The first series of twenty mezzotints was published in 1833 under the title, "Various Subjects of Landscape, characteristic of English Scenery, principally intended to display the Phenomena of the Chiar'oscuro of Nature." Constable devoted much attention to the enterprise during the remainder of his life, inspired to make it as fine as possible by the example of Claude's "Liber Veritatis" and Turner's "Liber Studiorum." But its "duration, its expense, its hopelessness of remuneration" oppressed him. "It harasses my days and disturbs my rest at nights" he wrote in 1831. Constable took things hardly, very hardly, after his wife's death in 1828.
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