Constable Part 3

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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE VIII.--SALISBURY.]

"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 sc.u.mbles 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, b.u.t.tresses, 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 pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sion 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 a.s.sociation of gentlemen, who purchased it of the painter's executors. Some of them wished to subst.i.tute 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 a.s.sociation 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 w.i.l.l.y 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 G.o.d 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 t.i.tle, "Various Subjects of Landscape, characteristic of English Scenery, princ.i.p.ally 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 hara.s.ses 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.

CHAPTER VI

HIS PERSONALITY AND OPINIONS

The personality of Constable was not romantic. In writing of him one has no moods of wonderment or bafflement, and the pen is not tempted to flights of wonder or fancy. The life of Turner might inspire a poem; but plain prose is the only vehicle for a consideration of the life of Constable. He was a sane, level-headed man compact of common-sense and practicality, a man of one great, embracive idea: that having studied the science of picture-making from the earlier masters, the landscape painter must learn from Nature and not from the derivative pictures of his contemporaries. Constable pursued that course with the single-heartedness of a man who devotes his life to some great commercial undertaking. Indeed the portraits of Constable might represent a prosperous and cultured banker, especially those of his later years, were it not for the full, observant eye that you feel surveys a wider domain than Lombard Street. Religious in the true sense, dutiful, humble before the mysteries of things; old-fashioned in the true sense, a lover and a quoter of good poetry and of the Bible, he had on occasion a sharp and shrewd tongue, but the sting was salved by the absolute sincerity of his intention. Leslie devotes considerable s.p.a.ce to a record of Constable's opinions and sayings, many of which have been quoted in these pages. Of a certain contemporary he said--"More over-bearing meekness I never met with in any one man." Of his own pictures he said--"They will never be popular, for they have no handling. But I do not see any handling in Nature."

Here is a saying about his art which sums up the whole tendency of his life--"Whatever may be thought of my art, it is my own; and I would rather possess a freehold, though but a cottage, than live in a palace belonging to another." And here is his comment on the unintelligent connoisseurship of his time--"The old rubbish of art, the musty, commonplace, wretched pictures which gentlemen collect, hang up, and display to their friends, may be compared to Shakespeare's--

'Beggarly account of empty boxes, Alligators stuffed,' etc.

Nature is anything but this, either in poetry, painting, or in the fields."

The lectures on Landscape Painting that he delivered at the Royal Inst.i.tution in Albemarle Street, at the Hampstead a.s.sembly Rooms, and at Worcester were never written, although an abstract of the first was found among his papers. He spoke from brief notes and made much use of a number of copies and engravings affixed to the walls. The notes taken by Leslie and embodied in his _Life of Constable_ are the only record we have apart from the abstract of the first lecture. The belittlers of Claude should make a note of Constable's idolatry for him:--"In Claude's landscape all is lovely--all amiable--all is amenity and repose;--the calm sunshine of the heart. He carried landscape, indeed, to perfection, that is, human perfection." Constable selected four works as marking four memorable points in the history of landscape--t.i.tian's "Peter Martyr," Poussin's "Deluge," Rubens'

"Rainbow," and Rembrandt's "Mill." In the choice of the Rubens and the Rembrandt everybody must concur. As Constable never visited Italy he can only have known the "Peter Martyr" from engravings. It was destroyed by fire in 1867, but a copy exists at S. Giovanni Paolo in Venice. Constable had the courage of his opinions, and of all his opinions the most astonishing is his strong disapproval of a national collection of pictures. In 1822 he wrote--"should there be a National Gallery (which is talked of) there will be an end of the art in poor old England, and she will become, in all that relates to painting, as much a nonent.i.ty as every other country that has one. The reason is plain; the manufacturers of pictures are then made the criterions of perfection, instead of Nature."

As a lecturer Constable seems to have relied in a great measure on the inspiration of the moment. Leslie also records the charm of a most agreeable voice, although pitched somewhat too low, and the play of his very expressive countenance. His survey of the history of landscape painting closed with an eulogy of Wilson, Gainsborough, Cozens, and Girtin, and I may close with a brief pa.s.sage, essential Constable, from the lecture delivered at Hampstead on 25th July 1836. "The landscape painter must walk in the fields with a humble mind. No arrogant man was ever permitted to see Nature in all her beauty. If I may be allowed to use a very solemn quotation, I would say most emphatically to the student--'Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth.'"