Constable Part 2

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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE VI.--A COUNTRY LANE.]

CHAPTER IV

HIS SKETCHES

Constable exhibited one hundred and four works at the Royal Academy.

In addition to these and other paintings, he produced many brilliant sketches and a number of drawings. Like Turner, his achievements may be exhaustively studied in public Exhibitions in London, and as with Turner, the difficulty is where to begin. At the National Gallery there is a wall composed, with one exception, entirely of his works; the Victoria and Albert Museum contains a room, or rather a hall of his pictures, sketches, and studies, and he is also represented at the Tate and Diploma Galleries. Some of the examples were bequeathed to the nation by his last surviving daughter, Miss Isabel Constable, in 1888.

Two years later Henry Vaughan bequeathed a number of works, including "The Hay Wain."

The casual visitor finds little emotional excitement, and no literary interest in these honest interpretations of English scenery. Constable was never dramatic ("The Opening of Waterloo Bridge" may be counted an exception) or idealistic like Turner. From a scenic point of view, "The Hay Wain" is dull compared with "Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus," and knowledge of art history is not so widely diffused as to give to "The Hay Wain" the interest it should command as a pioneer picture in modern landscape. Constable does not thrill. Roast beef does not thrill, but it is wholesome and life-communicating. Constable was a prosaic man of genius. Once he said that "painting is another word for feeling," but he also made that most characteristic retort to Blake, who, when looking through one of Constable's sketch-books, exclaimed on seeing a drawing of fir-trees on Hampstead Heath--"Why, this is not drawing, but inspiration." To which Constable quietly replied--"I meant it for drawing."

Constable never desired to thrill; his ambition was merely to be a natural painter, and he would probably not have been in the least distressed at the episode related by Mr Sturge Henderson in his biography. An elegant and attractive American woman after examining "The Glebe Farm" in the National Gallery, remarked to her son, a typical undergraduate: "Does this thrill you?" "Not the least in the world," replied the son, and they pa.s.sed on. No doubt these cultured moderns desired in a painting the "beauty touched with strangeness,"

that Botticelli and Piero della Francesca offer: there is no place in such aesthetic lives for the familiarity touched with honesty of John Constable. To-day his innovations--his attempts to represent the vibration of light, his spots and splashes of colour to counterfeit the sun glitter, his touches and sc.r.a.pings laid on with the palette knife to obtain force and brightness--have become a commonplace.

Constable, being a pioneer, was accustomed to misunderstanding and also to badinage. His breezy and showery effects, blowing wind, rustling gra.s.ses, waving trees, and wet rain, were occasionally the subjects of banter from his fellow Academicians and others. Fuseli, Professor of Painting, a bad artist, but a good joker, was once seen to open his umbrella as he entered the Exhibition.

"What are you doing with your umbrella up?" asked a friend.

"Oh," replied Fuseli, "I am going to look at Mr Constable's pictures!"

That was really a great compliment, and I may cap the story by quoting the brief, bald, criticism of Sir William Beechy on Constable's "Salisbury from the Meadows."

"Why, d--n it, Constable, what a d----d fine picture you are making; but you look d----d ill, and you have got a d----d bad cold."

No. Constable of the "unpicturesque localities" does not thrill, and his pictures evoke a meditative rather than an ecstatic mood. In his large works one never finds the haunting charm of a fine Corot, the majesty of a Rousseau, or the clarity of light and colour of a Harpigny. He did not, except in rare cases, select from the abundance of Nature; he was content with facts as he saw them, and he laboured at his surfaces until sometimes one can hardly disentangle the incidents for the paint in which they are enveloped. "The Leaping Horse," in the Diploma Gallery, is a magnificent performance in picture-making but it is heavy--heavy as a mid-day English Sunday dinner. It has force, strength, knowledge, vigour, but little beauty, except perhaps in the sweep of sky; and certainly no strangeness. The signs of labour are written all over it; you feel that he has carefully and conscientiously composed this picture for an exhibition, and that in the long labour he has lost the early impulse and freshness of the _pensee mere_. To see how much he lost you have only to study the large sketch for "The Leaping Horse," in the Victoria and Albert Museum, finer, bolder, much more instinct with life and inspiration than the finished production.

Which brings me to the two great divisions of Constable's life-work--the sketches, which we are told he did not regard as "serious," and the finished pictures.

His sketches are innumerable, and all, or at any rate the great majority of them possess the impulse, the lyrical note, so often lacking in his larger canvases. Of course, this criticism applies to all painters. The sketch is made for love, the picture for an Exhibition. What could be more luminously s.p.a.cious, unworried and unfettered by the convention of picture-making than his small oil-sketch of "Harwich: Sea and Lighthouse," in the Tate Gallery, of which there is a pencil sketch at South Kensington, dated 1815. Here is the first impression caught and transferred to canvas while the blood was still hot, the pulse quick, and the eyes eager to record this scene of desolate beauty, vast sky, rippling ocean, bare foresh.o.r.e, lonely lighthouse, and one figure in the foreground, with notes of almost indistinguishable figures beyond the lighthouse, and a few remote sails upon the sea. It has not the learning of "The Hay Wain"

or "The Leaping Horse," and the steady flame of Constable's fame would probably long ago have been extinguished had it depended for existence entirely upon his sketches; but, speaking for myself, it is to his sketches that I go for joy. Verily this student of Nature, who disliked autumn and loved spring; who painted summer, "its breezes, its heat, its heavy colouring," its gusts of winds, its sudden storms; verily he lives in our hearts wherever our eyes meet his sketches.

They induce, they compel one to linger in such places as the dark staircase of the Diploma Gallery, in Burlington House, the walls of which sing out with two groups of his sketches, significant moments seen in Nature. That beach and sea; the rain-storm streaming down the canvas; those floating clouds, only the clouds and the sky visible; that boat with the red sail labouring in the heavy water--they are essential Constable. And what an object lesson in the making of a landscape painter is provided by the hall of drawings, pictures, and sketches at the Victoria and Albert Museum. They are a standing refutation of Ruskin's words--"I have never seen any work of his in which there were signs of his being able to draw, and hence the most necessary details are painted by him insufficiently." Constable was not an inspired draughtsman; but that he worked hard at drawing, and that he achieved considerable mastery with his pencil is abundantly testified by the many examples at South Kensington, notably, "The Study of Trees at Hampstead," the "Windsor Castle from the River," the "Cart and Horses," and above all the magnificent and minute "Stem of an Elm Tree," none of which, as has already been noted, Ruskin had ever seen.

These are all interesting, almost meticulously conscientious, but for John Constable in more daring mood, carried away by the riot of the scene, we must turn to such sketches as the chaotic cloud forms of "Weymouth Bay," and the splashy, opulent splendour of the oil sketch called "View on the Stour." Or to the sketches that emerge, modestly but clamantly, from the large works on the wall devoted to his achievement at the National Gallery, which contains no fewer than twenty-two examples by Constable. One of them, "A Country Lane,"

ill.u.s.trated in these pages, served as a motive for his picture of "The Cornfield." The sobriety and somewhat heavy handling of this oil sketch places it in a category between the careful construction of the Exhibition pictures, and the impetuosity of most of the sketches. But the atmospheric "Salisbury" that hangs below, to the left of "A Country Lane," which is a preliminary study without the rainbow for the picture of "Salisbury from the Meadows," has all the quick, almost feverish informality of his best sketches. It is larger than the 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. As a contrast, examine "A Cornfield with Figures," a tranquilly beautiful suggestion of late summer--fifteen and a half inches by nine and a half--thinly painted rain-clouds floating past, the heat haze hovering in the field of corn partly reaped and stocked. The vivid, "Summer Afternoon after a Shower," hanging near by has an interest apart from its spontaneity and vigour. It is precisely what it looks, the recollection of a summer shower, noted in an ecstatic moment, and recorded at a sitting. The story is told by Leslie--how Constable was travelling by coach either to or from Brighton; how at Redhill he saw this effect; how he treasured the memory of it until the coach reached its destination, and how "immediately on alighting," he made this sketch of one wild moment s.n.a.t.c.hed from Nature.

PLATE VII.--SALISBURY CATHEDRAL FROM THE BISHOP'S GARDEN.

Victoria and Albert Museum.

In the interval between the painting of "The Hay Wain" (1821) and its exhibition in Paris (1824), Constable produced "Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop's Garden," wherein he attempted to represent the glitter of sunlight by spots of pure pigment, which his friends called "Constable's snow."

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE VII.--SALISBURY CATHEDRAL FROM THE BISHOP'S GARDEN.]

It was this constant study of Nature that distinguished Constable from those of his academic predecessors and contemporaries who studied only the works of other painters. It was in this solitary communion with Nature that Constable showed the originality of his genius. How thorough he was. He was not content to note only what his eyes saw, but he also observed and recorded the time of day and the direction of the wind.

"Twenty of Constable's studies of skies made during this season (1822) are in my possession," says Leslie, "and there is but one among them in which a vestige of landscape is introduced. They are painted in oil, on large sheets of thick paper, and all dated, with the time of day, the direction of the wind, and other memoranda on their backs. On one, for instance, is written:

'Fifth of September 1822. Ten o'clock morning, looking south-east, brisk wind at west. Very bright and fresh, grey clouds running fast over a yellow bed, about half-way in the sky.'"

That is the real Constable speaking, the Constable who had "found himself." But we are never wholly emanc.i.p.ated from tradition, and knowing the difficulties of his craft he retained his admiration for the great ones among his predecessors. In 1824, he wrote: "I looked into Angerstein's the other day; how paramount is Claude..."

Maybe. But Claude had to be left alone. Constable knew that in his heart, and, as he advanced in wisdom, art at second-hand held him less and less, and art at first hand, which is Nature, more and more. He learnt to rely upon his eyes and the cunning of his hand. And when he "thanked Heaven he had no imagination," there was more in that utterance than appears on the surface.

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 apprentices.h.i.+p, 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 t.i.tle, 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 ill.u.s.trations.

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 cla.s.sical 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, Ess.e.x," 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 a.s.sociate 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 G.o.d'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 grat.i.tude 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.

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.