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CONTENTS 
 
 eS  ecivonp - - ~ ~ . a 
 IT Earty YEARS - - ~ - - I 
 If THe Mrppie Years - - - 36 
 III Last Years - ~ ~ : - 60 
 ITV Work AND INFLUENCE~ - - - 88 
 
 INDEX - - - - - - 95 
 
LIST OF PLATES 
 
 IN COLOUR 
 
 THE CENOTAPH we ee Or 
 THE CORNFIELD, OR COUNTRY LANE - Frontispiece 
 
 PAGE 
 FLATFORD MILL, ON THE RIVER STOUR - ss 
 THE Hay-waINn - - - - ~ ey) 
 HAMPSTEAD HEATH - - : ~ om, Noe ea 
 THE VALLEY FARM - - - - ~ - 45 
 SALISBURY CATHEDRAL - ~ - - - 55 
 BOAT-BUILDING, NEAR FLATFORD MILL - 65 
 
 TREES NEAR HAMPSTEAD CHURCH ~ - - 83 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 | inte in many respects, John Constable was at 
 
 least singularly fortunate in his biographer, his friend 
 
 C. R. Leslie, himself a painter of some modest merit. 
 Leslie’s ‘‘ Memoirs of the Life of John Constable, R.A.,”’ first 
 published in 1843, has deservedly become a classic and to this 
 admirable work we are all of us indebted for most of what is 
 known concerning the life of the painter. With the excellent 
 good sense that distinguished him, Leslie, by generous quota- 
 tions from the artist’s letters, left Constable to a great extent 
 to tell his own story, and his example is one that lesser mortals 
 - cannot fail to do wisely in following. 
 
 In this attempt, then, to give a brief outline of the life history 
 of one of the greatest painters England ever produced, the 
 present writer wishes to acknowledge his overwhelming in- 
 debtedness to the fascinating human document which was 
 compiled by Leslie’s industry, enthusiasm, and good taste. 
 Since it was published, numbers of other books upon Constable 
 have appeared, notably Lord Windsor’s ‘‘John Constable, R.A.,”’ 
 and ‘‘Constable and his Influence on Landscape Painting,” 
 by C. J. Holmes; many of these have been consulted by the 
 writer, and will be found acknowledged in the text, but Leslie’s 
 ‘‘ Memoirs’ remains now, as when first printed, the chief 
 authority. Readers who are not yet acquainted with the book 
 may like to know that a handy edition has been included in 
 Messrs. Dent’s ‘“‘ Everyman’s Library,” and this edition has 
 the further attraction of containing a scholarly introduction by 
 Sir Charles J. Holmes, Director of the National Gallery. 
 
 F.R. 
 
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JOHN CONSTABLE 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 EARLY YEARS 
 
 the 11th of June, 1776, at East Bergholt, in Suffolk. He 
 
 was the second son of Golding Constable, who was the 
 grandson of a Yorkshire farmer who had moved from the 
 north of England to the borders of Essex and Suffolk. Golding 
 Constable had inherited a considerable property from an uncle, 
 and, in addition to having two windmills at East Bergholt— 
 where he made his home after his marriage in 1774 to Miss 
 Ann Watts—he also owned a water-mill at Flatford and another 
 at Dedham. His wife also had some money of her own, so that 
 the parents of the artist, if not rich, were at least comfortably 
 circumstanced. The marriage was eminently a happy one, and 
 Mr. and Mrs. Golding Constable had three sons and three 
 daughters. 
 
 John Constable, after appearing to be a weakly infant, grew 
 into a strong and healthy child. At the age of seven he was put 
 in a boarding school about fifteen miles from Bergholt, then he 
 was moved to a school at Lavenham, which was ill-conducted 
 by a love-sick headmaster and a bullying usher, and finally he 
 was sent to the grammar school at Dedham where he became 
 
 a favourite with the headmaster, the Rev. Dr. Grimwood. It 
 I 
 
 Je CONSTABLE, the landscape painter, was born on 
 
2 JOHN CONSTABLE 
 
 was the personality and character of the boy which won the 
 regard of the master rather than any disposition for scholarship. 
 Penmanship, we are told, was the one thing in which young 
 John excelled, and he acquired some knowledge of Latin and a 
 smattering of French, but already when he was sixteen he had 
 become devoted to painting, and had formed a curious friend- 
 ship with a plumber and glazier, one John Dunthorne, who 
 lived in a little cottage near Mr. Constable’s house and devoted 
 all his leisure to painting landscapes from Nature. John Con- 
 stable’s first attempts at painting were made in the company of 
 his friend Dunthorne in the open air and in the cottage. He 
 had no studio in his home, but later on he hired a room in the 
 village. 
 
 The father does not seem td have disapproved of his son’s 
 intimacy with this plumber-artist, but at that time he was 
 decidedly unwilling that his son should become a professional 
 artist. His parents had hoped that John might become a 
 clergyman, but when it became clear that he had no vocation 
 for this calling and was disinclined to make the necessary 
 studies, it was decided to make him a miller. For about a year, 
 therefore, John Constable was employed in his father’s mills, 
 and he is said to have performed his duties carefully and well. 
 To look out for changes of the sky is one of the most important 
 duties of a wind-miller, and with what searching scrutiny and 
 loving care young Constable watched the heavens is revealed 
 in his own comment on an early sketch, “Spring,” afterwards 
 engraved, of one of the mills in which he used to work. 
 
 “It may perhaps,”’ wrote Constable, “‘give some idea of one 
 of those bright and silvery days in the spring, when at noon 
 
EARLY YEARS 3 
 
 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: The clouds 
 accumulate in very large masses, and from their loftiness seem 
 to move but slowly: immediately upon these large clouds appear 
 numerous opaque patches, which are only small clouds passing 
 rapidly before them, and consisting of isolated portions detached 
 probably from the larger cloud. These floating much nearer 
 the earth may perhaps fall in with a stronger current of wind, 
 which, as well as their comparative lightness, causes them to 
 move with greater rapidity, hence they are called by wind- 
 millers and sailors, messengers, and always portend bad weather. 
 They float midway in what may be termed the lanes of the 
 clouds; and from being so situated, are almost uniformly in 
 shadow, receiving a reflected light only, from the clear blue 
 sky immediately above them. In passing over the bright parts 
 of the clouds they appear as darks, but in passing over the 
 shadowed parts they assume a grey, a pale, or a lurid hue.” 
 No moment of the time spent by the young wind-miller in 
 watching the sky was wasted, and the knowledge of clouds and 
 weather which he thus acquired in his youth was afterwards of 
 incalculable value to him as an artist. John Constable was now 
 between eighteen and nineteen, and the turning point in his 
 life was at hand. At Dedham resided the Dowager Lady 
 Beaumont, mother of Sir George Beaumont, the famous amateur 
 and collector, the friend of Sir Joshua Reynolds, and the pupil 
 
4 JOHN CONSTABLE 
 
 of Richard Wilson. Sir George frequently visited his mother 
 at Dedham, and Mrs. Constable, sympathizing with John’s 
 artistic yearnings, obtained for her son an introduction to the 
 great connoisseur. Sir George was kind and encouraging to 
 the young miller. He praised some pen-and-ink copies of 
 engravings after Raphael’s cartoons which Constable had made, 
 he showed him his favourite picture by Claude—**The Annun- 
 ciation,’ now in the National Gallery—and also lent him some 
 of Girtin’s water-colours, which he advised him to study as 
 ‘examples of great breadth and truth.’ These pictures by 
 Claude and Girtin were the first considerable works of art 
 which Constable had seen, and he always regarded his first 
 sight of them as an important epoch in his life. 
 
 Owing largely to the good opinion and influence of Sir 
 ‘George Beaumont, Constable was permitted in 1875 to go to 
 London with a view to ascertaining there his chances of success 
 as a painter. He was furnished with an introduction to Joseph 
 Farington, R.A., now more famous as a diarist than as a painter, 
 but then an artist of great influence in London who was spoken 
 of as “‘the Dictator of the Royal Academy.”’ Farington received 
 Constable kindly, gave him considerable encouragement, and 
 at an early date predicted that his style of landscape would 
 eventually “form a distinct feature in the art.” It is not true that 
 Constable ever became Farington’s pupil, as some have supposed, 
 but he, no doubt, received many valuable hints from him, and 
 particularly information regarding the practice of Richard Wilson, 
 under whom Farington had studied. From Farington’s “Diary” 
 itis clear that acordiality existed between himand Constable from 
 their very first meeting, and it is noticeable how plainly even 
 
EARLY YEARS 5 
 
 
 
 the formal phrases of the “‘Diary” convey a suggestion that 
 while a call from Turner was merely a duty endured, a call 
 from Constable was always a pleasure enjoyed. 
 
 While in London, Constable made the acquaintance of John 
 Thomas Smith, a draughtsman and engraver, who subsequently 
 became Keeper of Prints at the British Museum, but is best 
 remembered now as author of a “Life of Nollekens.”’ Smith not 
 only taught Constable something of the processes of etching, 
 but also gave him some excellent advice, notably warning him 
 not to invent figures for a landscape from his fancy :— 
 
 “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.” 
 
 This advice was treasured and faithfully adhered to with the 
 result that the figures in Constable’s landscapes invariably 
 appear natural and appropriate, such as he might have seen, 
 and probably did see on the spot. For the next two years 
 Constable divided his time between London and Bergholt, 
 keeping up a correspondence with Smith when he was in the 
 country, and these letters, preserved in Leslie’s ““Memoirs of 
 ~ the Life of John Constable,” are our chief source of information 
 as to the artist’s occupations during this period. Smith at this 
 time was publishing a series of etchings of picturesque cottages, 
 and some of Constable’s letters to him contained sketches of 
 cottages. Probably these sketches were as good as anything 
 Constable was doing at the time. He experimented with etching, 
 he copied a battle painting, and he painted two small subject 
 pictures, ‘“The Chemist” and ‘“‘Alchemist,” inspired by Romeo’s 
 
FLATFORD MILL, ON THE RIVER STOUR 
 Painted 1817 
 In the National Gallery 
 
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EARLY YEARS 9 
 
 account of an apothecary’s shop. Leslie says these two paintings 
 “have very little merit,’ and we may imagine that Constable in 
 painting them thought he was doing what he ought, what might 
 be popular, rather than what he himself wanted and was best 
 fitted to paint. A temporary despondency regarding his painting, 
 together with the breakdown of an old clerk who had been 
 eighteen years with Mr. Golding Constable, caused the artist 
 in 1797 to enter his father’s counting-house. Exactly how long 
 John Constable was engaged on this clerical work is not cer- 
 tainly known, but in 1799 he took up his brush again and never 
 afterwards laid it aside. 
 
 In February 1799, probably by the advice and goodwill of 
 Farington, he was admitted as a student to the Royal Academy 
 Schools, and establishing himself in rooms at 23, Cecil Street, 
 Strand, close to Somerset House which was then the head- 
 quarters of the Academy, he worked hard at both drawing from 
 the antique and painting. He copied ‘‘a sweet little picture by 
 Jacob Ruysdael,” which somebody lent him, and two landscapes 
 by Richard Wilson. In August he visited Ipswich and wrote 
 to Smith, “It is a most delightful country for a painter. I fancy 
 I see Gainsborough in every hedge and hollow tree.’’ Constable 
 was now finding his true vocation, and though the sketches 
 made during his first visit to Ipswich are lost, his letters make 
 it clear that he was painting from Nature each day and every 
 day, ‘‘ by all the daylight we have, and that is little enough.” 
 Of the work Constable did at the Royal Academy, almost the 
 only thing that remains is a remarkably fine study in black and 
 white chalk of a recumbent nude male figure, now in the Vic- 
 toria and Albert Museum, South Kensington. The drawing and 
 
 B 
 
10 JOHN CONSTABLE 
 
 modelling of this figure, and particularly of the legs, are so 
 good that this study is unique among Constable’s work; it 
 shows that he must have worked most conscientiously and 
 strenuously at the figure, though his heart was never really in 
 the business, and his subsequent portraits and figure paintings 
 were not nearly so satisfying. According to his own account 
 Constable found it necessary “‘to fag at copying, some time yet, 
 to acquire execution,”’ but all the time he was in London he was 
 secretly longing to be back in the country painting from Nature. 
 In a letter to his old friend the plumber Dunthorne he says, 
 ‘This fine weather almost makes me melancholy; it recalls so 
 forcibly every scene we have visited and drawn together. I 
 even love every stile and stump, and every lane in the village, 
 so deep-rooted are early impressions.”’ 
 
 In 1800 Constable spent some weeks in Helmingham Park, 
 taking possession of an empty parsonage, and in a letter to the 
 same correspondent he expresses his happiness at being “quite 
 alone among the oaks and solitudes.”’ Iwo of the drawings he 
 did here came into the possession of C. R. Leslie, who says that 
 ‘though slight and merely in black and white, they show that 
 he at that time possessed a true sense of the beautiful in com- 
 position.”” From another letter to Dunthorne we learn that in 
 the following year Constable moved to 50, Rathbone Place, 
 where he rented three rooms, one of them with three windows 
 providing him with a good light for painting. Modest enough 
 about his own powers, Constable confidentially informs Dun- 
 thorne that he is disgusted with the “‘cold trumpery stuff ’’ which 
 passes as landscapes among some of his artist acquaintances, and 
 he resolved to keep “more to himself” than he did formerly. 
 
EARLY YEARS II 
 
 An artist before natural scenery, Constable seems to have 
 become a moralist when contemplating the human figure. In 
 1802 he was absorbed by the anatomical lectures given at the 
 Royal Academy Schools by a Mr. Brookes, but while he made 
 many accurate and beautifully coloured anatomical drawings, 
 these lectures roused the moral and religious feelings of the 
 man rather than any artistic ambitions. Writing to Dunthorne 
 he enthusiastically exclaims: ‘Excepting astronomy, and that 
 I know little of, I believe no study is really so sublime, or goes 
 more to carry the mind to the Divine Architect. Indeed, the 
 whole machine which it has pleased God to form for the 
 accommodation of the real man, the mind, during its probation 
 in this vale of tears, is as wonderful as the contemplation of it 
 is affecting. I see, however, many instances of the truth, and a 
 melancholy truth it is, that a knowledge of the things created 
 does not always lead to a veneration of the Creator. Many of 
 the young men in this theatre are reprobates.”’ 
 
 There are few passages in all Constable’s letters which give a 
 better indication than this of his deeply religious nature, and 
 while on the subject it may be said at once that Constable’s own 
 record is singularly pure and stainless; his life contained no 
 passages which a biographer would desire to omit or white- 
 wash. 
 
 It was in this year, 1802, that Constable exhibited for the 
 first time at the Royal Academy, his picture being entitled 
 simply ‘‘Landscape,” but he had sent the year before and 
 been rejected. In later years the artist told Leslie of having 
 taken his rejected picture, a view of Flatford Mill, to the Presi- 
 dent of the Academy, Mr. Benjamin West, who consoled him 
 
12 JOHN CONSTABLE 
 
 for his disappointment, saying, ““Don’t be disheartened young 
 man, we shall hear of you again; you must have loved Nature 
 very much before you could have painted this.’’ West then took 
 a piece of chalk and showed Constable how he might improve 
 the chiaroscuro by some additional touches of light between 
 the stems and branches of the trees, saying, “‘Always remember, 
 sir, that light and shadow never stand still.’’ Constable said this 
 was the best lecture, because a practical one, on chiaroscuro 
 he ever heard. 
 
 Meanwhile Constable, now in his twenty-sixth year, was 
 no nearer earning a living by his brush than he had been at the 
 start. The only “‘jobs’”’ he appears to have secured as yet were 
 to copy a portrait and to paint “a background to an ox.” He 
 was tempted to accept a position as drawing-master in a school 
 which Dr. Fisher, rector of Langham and afterwards Bishop of 
 Salisbury, procured for him; but, again, Benjamin West stood 
 his friend and warned him that to accept it would be to give 
 up all hopes of distinction as a painter. West not only gave 
 this advice, but extricated the young artist from a difficulty by 
 himself explaining to Dr. Fisher, in a manner that could not 
 possibly give offence, why Constable ought to decline his well- 
 intentioned offer. 
 
 In a letter to Dunthorne this same summer, Constable makes 
 his now world-famed profession of faith: ‘For the last two 
 years I have been running after pictures, and seeking the truth 
 at second hand. I have not endeavoured to represent Nature 
 with the same elevation of mind with which I set out, but have 
 rather tried to make my performances look like the work of 
 other men. I am come to a determination to make no idle 
 
EARLY YEARS 13 
 
 
 
 visits this summer, nor to give up my time to commonplace 
 people. 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 little or nothing in the exhibition 
 worth looking up to. There 1s room enough for a natural painter. 
 The great vice of the present day is bravura, an attempt to do 
 something beyond the truth. Fashion always had, and will 
 have, its day; but truth in all things only will last, and can only 
 have just claims on posterity.” 
 
 Beyond all question there was room for “‘a natural painter”’ in 
 this age, when artificiality was the rage and the fashion, but 
 could the natural painter ever hope to make a living? Unswayed 
 by thoughts of ways and means Constable set about carrying 
 out his theories in practice, and the first fruits of his renewed 
 efforts were two landscapes and two “Studies from Nature”’ 
 which he exhibited at the Academy in 1803. They appear to 
 have attracted little notice, but Constable was not discouraged 
 and writing to his friend Dunthorne he said confidentially : 
 ‘The exhibition is a very indifferent one on the whole. In the 
 landscape way most miserable. . . . There are, however, some 
 good portraits. . 
 
 ‘Tt feel now, more than ever, a decided conviction that I 
 shall sometime or other make some good pictures. Pictures 
 that shall be valuable to posterity, if I reap not the benefit of 
 them. This hope, added to the great delight I find in the art 
 itself, buoys me up, and makes me pursue it with ardour. 
 
 ‘‘ Panorama painting seems all the rage. ‘There are four or 
 five now exhibiting, and Mr. R—. is coming out with another, 
 a view of Rome, which I have seen.”’ 
 
14 JOHN CONSTABLE 
 
 The great event of this year for Constable was a sea-trip he 
 made, before the opening of the Academy, from London to 
 Deal in the Coutts, an East Indiaman whose captain was a 
 friend of Mr. Golding Constable. ‘This voyage really gave 
 Constable his first insight into the art of the marine painter, 
 and he relates his experiences in a letter to Dunthorne :— 
 
 ‘“‘T was near a month on board, and was much employed in 
 making drawings of ships in all situations. I saw all sorts of 
 weather. Some the most delightful, and some as melancholy. 
 But such is the enviable state of a painter that he finds delight 
 in every dress Nature can possibly assume. . . 
 
 ‘At Chatham I hired a boat to see the men-of-war.... I 
 sketched the Victory in three views. She was the flower of the 
 flock, a three decker of (some say) 112 guns. She looked very 
 beautiful, fresh out of dock and newly painted. When I saw 
 her they were bending the sails; which circumstances, added 
 to avery fine evening, made a charming effect. . . . The worst 
 part of the story is that I have lost all my drawings. The ship 
 was such a scene of confusion, when I left her, that although I 
 had done my drawings up very carefully, I left them behind. 
 When I found, on landing, that I had left them, and saw the 
 ship out of reach, I was ready to faint, I hope, however, I may 
 see them again some time or other.” 
 
 Fortunately Constable did manage to recover about 130 of 
 his marine drawings, and he made good use of his Victory 
 studies three years later for his water-colour, ““H.M.S. Victory 
 in the Battle of ‘Trafalgar, between Two French Ships of the 
 Line,’’ which was exhibited in 1806. The Victory Constable 
 knew intimately, and he was able to visualize its position in the 
 
EARLY YEARS 15 
 
 battle from a description given him by a Suffolk man who had 
 been on Nelson’s ship. 
 
 Between 1804 and 1807 we know little of Constable’s doings 
 because as yet biographers have discovered no letters to or 
 from him covering this period. In 1804 he did not exhibit at 
 the Academy and much of his time this year was occupied in 
 painting an altar-piece for Brantham Church, near Bergholt, 
 the subject being “‘Christ blessing little Children.” I had a 
 good opportunity of studying this large picture, in which the 
 figures are life-size, when it was lent to the Constable Exhibition 
 at the Leeds Art Gallery, and though it cannot be considered 
 a great achievement, and is rather brown and dull in colour, I 
 found that it had a certain tenderness in the conception and 
 treatment which went some way towards neutralizing the defects 
 for which is has been criticized. Sir C. J. Holmes has pro- 
 nounced it to be ‘‘a feeble imitation of West’s religious works,”’ 
 and no doubt Constable was influenced by Benjamin West in 
 this painting, but the feeling is genuine and not mawkish. 
 Leslie said of it, ‘The arrangement of the masses is good, but 
 it has no other merit,’ yet as a matter of fact the arrangement 
 of the figures, all standing except a child in the Saviour’s arms, 
 becomes a little monotonous, and I would rather say that its 
 chief merit is its simplicity and its expression, fervent though 
 weak, of piety and reverence. 
 
 Though essentially a religious man, Constable doubtless felt 
 that he would never attain excellence in the painting of religious 
 subjects, and only once again in his life did he attempt an altar- 
 piece. This was four years later, in 1808, when he executed a 
 single half-length figure of the Saviour blessing the bread and 
 

 
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EARLY YEARS 19 
 
 wine for Nayland Church, which is within a short walk of East 
 Bergholt. In this painting Constable shows more originality in 
 his colour scheme, Leslie admitting that the broken purples 
 and brownish yellows in the draperies are “very agreeable,”’ 
 and the effect of lamplight on the face is not unskilful; but the 
 work is not impressive as a whole, and considering the localities 
 of the two churches we shall not be far wrong in assuming that 
 Constable knowingly went out of his own particular field of art 
 chiefly in the endeavour to do a kindness and give pleasure to 
 his neighbours. 7 
 More important than either of these altar-pieces was a journey 
 to the Lake Country, which Constable made in 1806, on the 
 advice of his maternal uncle, David Pike Watts, who defrayed 
 his expenses for the tour. Some of the sketches made by the 
 artist in Westmorland and Cumberland are now in the Victoria 
 and Albert Museum, South Kensington, and are considered to 
 be among the very best of his water-colours. But though this 
 journey furnished Constable with subjects for some small 
 _ pictures subsequently exhibited, the grandiose scenery of the 
 lakes did not appeal to him so strongly as the more homely 
 scenes in his native Suffolk. Perhaps his innate modesty 
 restrained him from attempting to depict the wild and terrible 
 in Nature, but whatever the cause he left the lakes to Turner, 
 and made his own name immortal by the interpretation of more 
 placid scenes. Leslie declares that Constable confessed to him 
 that “‘the solitude of mountains oppressed his spirits. His 
 nature was peculiarly social and could not feel satisfied with 
 scenery, however grand in itself, that did not abound in 
 human associations. He required villages, churches, farmhouses, 
 
20 JOHN CONSTABLE 
 
 and cottages; and I believe it was as much from natural 
 temperament as from early impressions that his first love, in 
 landscape, was also his latest love.” 
 
 Some of the results of this excursion were shown at the 
 Royal Academy, ‘“‘A View in Westmorland,” “‘Keswick Lake,” 
 and “Bow Fell” in 1807, and “Borrowdale,” “A Scene in 
 Cumberland,”’ and ‘“Windermere Lake’”’ in 1808; but somehow 
 neither then nor since have these landscapes ever attained a 
 place in public favour ever approaching the artist’s Suffolk and 
 southern landscapes. 
 
 Meanwhile events were conspiring to seduce the painter from 
 devoting himself solely to landscape painting. In 1806 he 
 visited a family of bankers named Lloyd at Birmingham, painted 
 several of their portraits and apparently gave satisfaction to the 
 sitters. His own family, who knew nothing about art—except 
 that the most famous landscape painter of his age, Richard 
 Wilson, R.A., the ‘‘ Father of British Landscape,” nearly died 
 of starvation—and were perfectly satisfied with the portraits of 
 themselves which John had painted, were all inclined to push 
 him towards the more remunerative branch of portraiture. 
 A great sensation was caused in 1811 when Benjamin West’s 
 picture of “Christ healing the Sick”’ was sold for £3,000. Con-. 
 stable’s mother saw it and thought her John’s altar-piece at 
 Brantham just as good and rather better. With the best inten- 
 tions the good lady hastened to write to her son, saying, “In 
 truth, my dear John, though in all human probability my head 
 will be laid low long ere it comes to pass, yet with my present 
 light, I can perceive no reason why you should not one day 
 with diligence and attention be the performer of a picture 
 
EARLY YEARS 21 
 
 worth {£3,000.”’ Poor dear woman, how surprised she would 
 have been had anyone told her that a hundred years later a 
 collector would pay £100,000 for a landscape. 
 
 Worst of all, Constable fell in love, he wanted to marry, and 
 to marry he required an income, not merely an allowance. In 
 1800 a little girl came to visit her grandfather, the Rev. Dr. 
 Durand Rhudde, rector of East Bergholt and Brantham. Her 
 name was Maria Bicknell, and her father, Charles Bicknell, was 
 solicitor to the Admiralty and lived in Spring Gardens, London. 
 Constable made little Miss Bicknell’s acquaintance during her 
 first visit to her grandfather, and saw a good deal of her during 
 subsequent visits, but it was not till about 1810 apparently that 
 he discovered he was in love with her and seriously entertained 
 the idea to make her his wife. From the charming series of 
 letters, preserved in Leslie’s ““Memoirs,’”’ which set forth the 
 history of Constable’s courtship and marriage, it would appear 
 that he definitely proposed to Miss Bicknell some time in 
 October, 1811. In the first letter of this series, dated November 
 2nd that year, Miss Bicknell, who was then visiting a friend in 
 the country, writes : “‘I am very impatient, as you may imagine, 
 to hear from Papa, on the subject so fraught with interest to us 
 both; but was unwilling to delay writing to you, as you would 
 be ignorant of the cause of such seeming inattention. . . . You 
 know my sentiments; I shall be guided by my father in every 
 respect. Should he acquiesce in my wishes, I shall be happier 
 than I can express. If not, I shall have the consolation of 
 reflecting that I am pleasing him, a charm that will in the end 
 give the greatest satisfaction to my mind.” 
 
 These are most proper sentiments, no doubt, for an early 
 
22 JOHN CONSTABLE 
 
 nineteenth-century young lady, though they read strangely in 
 the twentieth century. “‘Papa,” according to his daughter, was 
 both ‘reasonable and kind”’; he bore the artist no personal ill-will 
 and raised no objection to the match except “‘on the score of that 
 necessary evil, money.’’ But unfortunately a still more power- 
 ful force resolved to oppose the union tooth and nail. This was 
 old Dr. Rhudde, who, it was known, intended to bequeath a 
 large sum of money to his granddaughter Maria, and did not 
 wish her to marry an impecunious artist. In the circumstances 
 Miss Bicknell was disposed to abandon hopes and resign herself 
 to nothing more than a friendship with the artist. ““We should 
 both of us be bad subjects for poverty, should we not?” she 
 writes. “Even painting would go on badly; it could hardly 
 survive in domestic worry.” 
 
 When Constable, more courageous, assured her, “‘We have 
 only to consider our union as an event that must happen, and 
 we shall yet be happy,’ Maria primly replied : “You grieve 
 and surprise me by continuing so sanguine on a subject alto- 
 gether hopeless. I cannot endure that you should harbour 
 expectations that must terminate in disappointment. I never 
 can consent to act in opposition to the wishes of my father. 
 How, then, can I continue a correspondence wholly dis- 
 approved of by him? ... You must be certain that you 
 cannot write without increasing feelings that must be entirely 
 suppressed. You will, therefore, I am sure, see the impro- 
 priety of sending me any more letters.”’ 
 
 This was in December, 1811, and Constable, persistent and 
 certainly not easily discouraged, returned to the attack in the 
 following spring, when he appears to have broken down her 
 
EARLY YEARS 23 
 
 self-denying ordinance, and a regular exchange of letters took 
 place. In one, dated April, 1812, occurs the significant passage : 
 “I am now engaged with portraits. Mr. Watts sat to me this 
 morning, and seems pleased with what is going on. I am 
 copying a picture for Lady Heathcote, her own portrait as 
 Hebe.” In other words, the great landscape artist was turning 
 himself into a portrait-painting hack in the endeavour to 
 improve his income. Also, he calls on the formidable Dr. 
 Rhudde—“‘who was very courteous’”—and Constable con- 
 gratulates himself on this tactful advance, confessing that 
 “though this may not better our cause, it cannot make it 
 - worse.” 
 
 In May matters have so far improved that Constable writes 
 to “My dearest Maria,’ and Miss Bicknell replies to ““My dear 
 John.” During this month the artist’s true friend, the Rev. 
 John Fisher, afterwards Archdeacon Fisher, chaplain to his 
 uncle, the Bishop of Salisbury, tries to persuade the artist to 
 visit him and paint in the open air at Salisbury. But the slave 
 of love in London actually boasts, “I am getting on with my — 
 picture for Lady Heathcote. Lady Louisa Manners has a 
 wretched copy by Hoppner from Sir J. Reynolds, which she 
 wishes me to repaint. ... I am determined not to fritter 
 away the summer, if I can help it.”’ 
 
 So June comes and finds Constable still in London, set on 
 money-making by portraiture. On the roth he writes to Miss 
 Bicknell that he has completed a portrait of Dr. Fisher, Bishop 
 of Salisbury, “quite to their satisfaction’ —that is of Dr. and 
 Mrs. Fisher. “‘I am to make a duplicate of it for the palace at 
 Exeter.”’ In a letter dated June 15th the true Constable breaks 
 
24 | JOHN CONSTABLE 
 
 out with the cry : “I am making sad ravages of my time with 
 the wretched portraits I mentioned to you. I am ungallant 
 enough to allude entirely to the ladies’ portraits. I see no end, 
 if I stay, to my labours in Pall Mall.” 
 
 And all this time Constable is “‘sighing for the country.” At 
 last, in the third week of June, he tears himself from London 
 and gets back to East Bergholt. On July 22nd he writes: “I 
 have been living a hermit-like life, though always with my 
 pencil in my hand. . . . How much real delight have I had 
 with the study of landscape this summer !”’ But even in the 
 country circumstances conspire to seduce the artist from the 
 peaceful pursuit of landscape painting. On September 6th he 
 writes : “I am going to-morrow to stay a few days at General 
 Rebow’s, near Colchester, to paint his little girl, an only child, 
 seven years old; I believe I am to paint the general and his lady 
 at some future time.” | 
 
 In November, 1812, a fire broke out at the house in Charlotte 
 Street, where Constable was living. Fortunately, he lost 
 nothing and only suffered “‘a temporary inconvenience,” but 
 his goodness of heart and courage at this time were displayed 
 by his heroically re-entering the burning house and mounting 
 through the smoke to the garret in order to rescue the fortune 
 of a poor woman servant who, in her fright, had left all her 
 money under her pillow. 
 
 This same month his mother, an exemplary parent, and yet 
 utterly unable to understand the real genius of her son, again 
 endeavours to push John further along the wrong road by 
 writing : ““You now so greatly excel in portraits that I hope 
 you will pursue a path the most likely to bring you fame and 
 
EARLY YEARS 25 
 
 wealth, by which you can alone expect to obtain the object of 
 your fondest wishes.’’ His lady love was no more helpful. 
 She expresses sorrow at seeing how ‘unsettled’? John has 
 become, and sententiously continues : ‘You will allow others, 
 without half your abilities, to outstrip you in the race of fame, 
 and then look back with sorrow on time neglected and oppor- 
 tunities lost, and perhaps blame me as the cause of all this woe. 
 Exert yourself while it is yet in your power; the path of duty is 
 alone the path of happiness.”’ 
 
 Though Constable had a good deal of ill-health, both in 
 1812 and 1813, he continued to “‘exert’’ himself, painting 
 Nature because he loved her and portraits from a sense of duty. 
 What little reputation he enjoyed at this time was as a land- 
 scape painter, and he continued to contribute landscapes to 
 the Royal Academy exhibitions. His four small pictures there 
 in 1812 included a “‘View of Salisbury” and a “Flatford Mill’; 
 in 1813 he exhibited “Landscape : Boys Bathing” and “Land- 
 scape: Morning.’ In June, John Fisher wrote to him from 
 Salisbury stating he had heard Constable’s larger picture 
 “‘spoken of here, by no inferior judge, as one of the best in the 
 exhibition.”’ Yet, in his frantic desire to get his finances into 
 a marriageable condition, Constable lacked the courage to 
 leave portraiture alone. At the end of June he was on the 
 point of leaving London for Suffolk, but he writes : “‘I was, 
 however, prevented by a call on me for portraits; for I assure 
 you, my reputation in that way is much on the increase. One 
 of them, a portrait of the Rev. George Bridgman, a brother of 
 Lord Bradford, far excels any of my former attempts in that 
 way, and is doing me a great deal of service. My price for a 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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EARLY YEARS 29 
 
 head is fifteen guineas; and I am tolerably expeditious when 
 I can have fair play at my sitter. I have been much engaged 
 for Lady Heathcote, who seems bent on serving me. My pic- 
 tures of herself and her mother occupy either end of the large 
 drawing-room in Grosvenor Square; they have magnificent 
 frames, and make a great dash. She is to bring me a handsome 
 boy at the Christmas holidays. . . . I am now leaving London 
 for the only time in my life with my pockets full of money. 
 I am entirely free from debt (not that my debts ever exceeded 
 my usual annual income), and I have required no assistance 
 from my father.”’ 
 
 To appreciate the a anipeanee of these lines we should 
 remember that the writer was now thirty-seven years of age, 
 and the money in his pocket, “‘for the only time,’’ was earned 
 by portraits, not landscapes. In spite of the real sacrifices he 
 was making, Constable’s matrimonial suit made little progress. 
 Mr. Bicknell did not dislike him personally, but he would not 
 consent to any engagement so long as his wife’s father dis- 
 approved of the match, fearing that if he did so Maria might 
 lose her expected legacy from Dr. Rhudde. Early in 1814 
 Constable begs Miss Bicknell to keep up a weekly correspond- 
 ence. This, she declares, is “totally impracticable,” but she 
 softens her refusal by saying, “‘I will write as often as I can.” 
 
 From this year (1814) dates the beginning of a slight turn in 
 Constable’s fortunes. At the very moment when his relatives 
 were expressing concern that he should still devote so much of 
 his time to the production of unmarketable pictures, Constable 
 sold two landscapes, a small picture exhibited at the British 
 Gallery, to a Mr. Allnutt, and a larger painting of ‘“‘A Lock’’ 
 
 Cc 
 
 St. Victor's Schoo! Library 
 Los Angeles 46, Calif. 
 
30 JOHN CONSTABLE 
 
 to a Mr. James Carpenter. ‘He is a stranger to me, and bought 
 it because he liked it.”’ Mr. Allnutt also was a stranger, but 
 having views of his own about the painting of skies, he foolishly 
 employed Linnell to substitute another sky for that painted by 
 Constable. He lived to lament his vandalism, and some years 
 later the chastened connoisseur humbly admitted his error and 
 approached Constable, who good-naturedly not only restored 
 his own sky, but painted an entirely new picture of the same 
 subject on a slightly smaller scale so that it might pair exactly 
 with another painting hung in the same room. Mr. Allnutt 
 subsequently related that when he wished to settle the account 
 for the work Constable had done, the artist protested that he 
 had no charge to make, but was himself under an obligation to 
 his patron, saying “‘I had been the means of making a painter 
 of him, by buying the first picture he ever sold to a stranger, 
 which gave him so much encouragement, that he determined 
 to pursue a profession in which his friends had great doubts of 
 his success.”’ 
 
 In 1814 Constable painted the picture of “Willy Lott’s 
 House,”’ a small farmhouse on the river close to Flatford Mill, 
 now hanging in the Victoria and Albert Museum, South 
 Kensington, and further sent two more landscapes, “‘Ploughing 
 Scene in Suffolk” and “A Ferry,” to the Royal Academy. 
 
 Encouraged by this small measure of success, Constable 
 returned to his landscape studies with renewed zeal and 
 increased power. With his landscapes proving saleable, John 
 contemplates married bliss as within the bounds of an early 
 possibility. He writes optimistically to his beloved Maria, who 
 replies : “Indeed, my dear John, people cannot live now upon 
 
EARLY YEARS 31 
 
 £400 a year; it is a bad subject, therefore adieu to it.”’ And the 
 self-possessed young lady expresses mild surprise that John 
 should stay in the country at this time and so miss the oppor- 
 tunity of seeing in London “‘our illustrious visitors,” the 
 Emperor Alexander and the King of Prussia. Alas, John 
 Constable was no courtier, and had eyes for no monarch but 
 King Sol! Fortunately for posterity, the artist withstood the 
 temptation to “see the sights” in London, and celebrated the 
 victory of the allies over Napoleon in his own way—by remain- 
 ing quietly in the country at East Bergholt all the summer and 
 all the autumn, achieving, among other things, his first real 
 masterpiece, painted entirely in the open air, the famous 
 “Boat-building”’ (see illustration), which shows us a meadow 
 at Flatford with a barge on the stocks, while beyond it the 
 River Stour glitters in the still sunshine of a hot summer’s day. 
 ‘This picture,” said Leslie, “is a proof that, in landscape, 
 what painters call warm colours are not necessary to produce 
 a warm effect. It has indeed no positive colour, and there is 
 much of grey and green in it; but such is its atmospheric truth, 
 that the tremulous vibration of the heated air near the ground 
 seems visible.”’ If Constable’s mind was uneasy about his love 
 affair at this time, no restlessness of his was reflected in his 
 painting, and all who see this beautiful picture in the Victoria 
 and Albert Museum will gladly admit that the work is the quin- 
 tessence of serenity and repose. It was exhibited in the following 
 year at the Royal Academy but, sad to relate, found no purchaser 
 then or afterwards. This “perfect work,” as Leslie calls it, re- 
 mained in the possession of the artist to the end of his life. 
 Another great point, in Constable’s estimation, was gained 
 
32 JOHN CONSTABLE 
 
 in 1815, when Mr. Bicknell permitted him to be “a visitor in 
 a friendly way” at Spring Gardens. As against this favour 
 gained, however, was set a serious loss, that of his mother, 
 who in May had a paralytic stroke which terminated fatally; 
 and by a strange coincidence Mrs. Bicknell, Maria’s mother, 
 died a few days afterwards. The lovers consoled one another, 
 and that summer Maria’s letters were less “‘practical’’ and far 
 more sympathetic. “How delightful this sweet rain will make 
 those dear fields look, that I envy you the sight of,’”’ she writes 
 in July. “How much you must enjoy painting in the open air, 
 after Mr. Dawe’s room.”’ Dawe, by the way, was a man who 
 earlier in the year had given Constable the “‘job”’ of painting a 
 background in a large picture. Again, in September, she 
 writes : “‘How charmed you must be with this long continu- 
 ance of fine weather. ... Nature and you must be greater 
 friends than ever.” The reader begins to have hopes that 
 Maria, after all, is not ill-fitted to the honour which Constable 
 proposes to do her. 
 
 This mild but, even so, new-found happiness of the pair 
 was rudely disturbed in the following February, when old Dr. 
 Rhudde discovered that Constable had been allowed to pay 
 occasional visits to Spring Gardens, and wrote a violent letter 
 to Mr. Bicknell. “Poor dear Papa, to have such a letter written 
 to him !” wails his daughter. “I know not how it will end. 
 Perhaps the storm may blow over; God only knows. We must 
 be patient. I am sure your heart is too good not to feel for my 
 father. He would wish to make us all happy if he could. Pray, 
 do not come to town just yet.”’ A week later, on February 13th, 
 she writes : ““The kind doctor says he ‘considers me no longer 
 
EARLY YEARS 33 
 
 as his granddaughter,’ and, from the knowledge I have of his 
 character, I infer he means what he says. . . . Papa says, if 
 we were to marry and live at Bergholt, he thinks the doctor 
 would leave the place.” The modern admirer of the artist can 
 contemplate this prospect with equanimity, but to the Bicknells, 
 and no doubt to Constable himself, this would have appeared 
 to be a calamity. Constable, who had always disliked his visits 
 being kept a secret, replies in a manly tone: ‘‘My sisters trust 
 the calm will not long be disturbed, though I have always 
 feared it was a deceitful one, and that we have been making 
 ourselves happy over a barrel of gunpowder.”’ Later he says: 
 “T shall not concern myself with the justice or injustice of 
 others; that must rest with themselves; it is sufficient for us to 
 know that we have done nothing to deserve the ill opinion of 
 any one. Our business is now more than ever with ourselves. 
 I am entirely free from debt, and I trust, could I be made 
 happy, to receive a good deal more than I do now by my 
 profession. After this, my dearest Maria, I have nothing more 
 to say, than the sooner we are married the better; and from 
 this time I shall cease to listen to any arguments the other way, 
 from any quarter. I wish your father to know what I have 
 written, if you think with me.” 
 
 All this winter Constable had been further troubled by 
 anxiety over his father, whose health was in a very bad state. 
 Towards the end of March, 1816, the artist arrived in London 
 with two pictures for the Academy, “A Wheatfield” and “A 
 Wood : Autumn,” but was recalled to Bergholt by the death of 
 his father, who died suddenly “while sitting in his chair, as 
 usual, without a sigh or pang.” 
 
34 JOHN CONSTABLE 
 
 With both his parents dead, Constable, though he enjoyed 
 the affectionate regards of his brothers and sisters, felt lonelier 
 than ever, and hungered for a home of his own. The storm 
 appears to have blown over, and during the summer John 
 renewed his visits to Miss Bicknell. In August she writes: 
 “Thank you, my dear John, for sending me your sweet picture. 
 Come early this evening.’’ During this month the artist visited 
 his friends the Rebows, who behaved most kindly and gener- 
 ously. The general commissioned Constable to paint two 
 landscapes, one of his park and another of a wood. Being well 
 acquainted with the artist’s love story, the general mentioned 
 that while he could take his own time about them, he would 
 pay for them in advance, knowing, as Constable writes, “that 
 we may soon want a little ready money. Another good friend, 
 the Rev. John Fisher, wrote to Constable in September strongly 
 urging him not to delay his wedding any longer, and inviting 
 the artist and his prospective bride to spend their honeymoon 
 with Mrs. Fisher and himself. ‘The archdeacon’s letter was 
 very much to the point : “I intend to be in London on Tuesday 
 evening, the 24th, and on Wednesday shall hold myself ready 
 and happy to marry you. There, you see, I have used no 
 roundabout phrases, but said the thing at once, in good plain 
 English. So do you follow my example, and get you to your 
 lady, and instead of blundering out long sentences about ‘the 
 Hymeneal altar,’ etc., say that on Wednesday, September 25th, 
 you are ready to marry her. If she replies, like a sensible 
 woman, as I suspect she is, “Well, John, here is my hand, I am 
 ready,’ all well and good. If she says,‘ Yes, but another day will 
 be more convenient,’ let her name it, and I am at her service.” 
 
EARLY YEARS 35 
 
 Constable sent Fisher’s letter on to Maria, who now found 
 herself firmly impaled on the horns of a dilemma, the warring 
 points of which were her duty to her father and the duty which 
 she now recognized she owed to John. Before Fisher’s arrival, 
 her conscience made one last filial struggle : ‘‘Papa is averse to 
 everything I propose. If you please, you may write to him; it 
 will do neither good nor harm. I hope we are not going to do 
 a very foolish thing. . . . Once more, and for the last time ! 
 it is not too late to follow Papa’s advice and wait. . . . Not- 
 withstanding all I have been writing, whatever you deem best, 
 Ido.” 
 
 John deemed that they had waited long enough. After all, 
 they were not children. Maria herself was twenty-nine; John 
 had turned forty. The lady could not be ready by the 25th, 
 but on October 2nd they were married at St. Martin’s Church 
 by Mr. Fisher, and spent the honeymoon with him and Mrs. 
 Fisher at Osmington, near Weymouth. 
 
 Anticipating events, it may be said at once that Mr. Bicknell 
 soon became reconciled to the marriage and grew very fond of 
 his son-in-law. Old Dr. Rhudde was not so easily placated, 
 but, somewhat to the surprise of the Constables, when he died, 
 in 1819, it became known that he had left his granddaughter 
 £4,000. Possibly, had she remained single, Maria might have 
 inherited a larger portion of the “necessary evil.’’ 
 
CHAPTER II 
 ‘THE MIDDLE YEARS 
 
 HAT married life suited Constable is a thing which 
 
 even the most hardened cynic cannot dispute. He was 
 happier now than he had ever been before, and his 
 happiness was soon reflected in a series of noble paintings 
 surpassing anything he had ever previously achieved. The 
 couple set up house at 1, Keppel Street, Russell Square, and 
 here was born the first son, to whom the name of his father 
 was given. Leslie, his biographer, who got to know the artist in- 
 timately soon after the marriage, says that the boy was as often in 
 his father’s arms as in those of his nurse or his mother. “‘ His fond- 
 ness for children exceeded, indeed, that of any man I ever knew.” 
 In 1817 he exhibited at the British Gallery “‘A Harvest-field 
 with Reapers and Gleaners,’’ and at the Academy “Scene on 
 a Navigable River,” ““Wivenhoe Park,” “A Cottage,” and a 
 portrait of Mr. Fisher. But now he was devoting himself more 
 and more to landscape, and spent the autumn at Bergholt 
 collecting material for his next year’s pictures. Four landscapes 
 were sent to the Academy in 1818, the most important being 
 “Landscape: Breaking up of aShower.” To the British Gallery 
 he sent “A Cottage in a Cornfield,’ of which Leslie observes : 
 “The cottage in this little picture isclosely surrounded by thecorn, 
 which on the side most shaded from the sun, remains green, while 
 over the rest of the field it has ripened; one of many circum- 
 stances that may be discovered in Constable’s landscapes, which 
 
 mark them as the productions of anincessant observer of Nature.” 
 36 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 37 
 
 Though Constable was painting at this time as well as ever 
 he did, his exhibits appear to have attracted little notice; but in 
 1819 he had a greater success at the Academy with “‘A Scene 
 on the River Stour,” afterwards known as ‘‘Constable’s White 
 Horse,’ from the white horse in a barge near the foreground. 
 Measuring 51 by 73 inches, this was the largest and most 
 important work Constable had yet produced; it marked a 
 distinct advance and attracted more notice than any of his 
 previous exhibits. It was purchased by Archdeacon Fisher for 
 100 guineas, and was probably the cause of Constable being 
 elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in the following 
 November. Altogether, 1819 was a good year for Constable, 
 his father’s affairs being then wound up he inherited a sum of 
 £4,000, and his wife presented him with a “lovely little girl,” 
 to whom his good friend Fisher stood godfather. In the follow- 
 ing year he repeated his success at the Academy by exhibiting 
 his magnificent “Stratford Mull,” which was sold for 100 
 guineas, and three-quarters of acentury later established a “‘Con- 
 stable record” when it brought {£8,925 at the Huth Sale in 1895. 
 
 This is the picture which was engraved by David Lucas as 
 “The Young Waltonians,” the new title being taken from the 
 group of children fishing in the foreground. On the left-hand 
 side of the canvas a glimpse is given of the old water-mill, which 
 no longer exists, while to the right and in the middle distance 
 a barge floats on the placid, willow-shaded waters of the Stour. 
 A group of tall trees forms the centre of the composition, and 
 the sky is exceedingly beautiful with light clouds which throw 
 their shadows over a rising distance. Archdeacon Fisher pur- 
 chased the picture as a present for his solicitor, Mr. ‘Tinney, of 
 
38 JOHN CONSTABLE 
 
 Salisbury, but since he considered the price of 100 guineas to 
 be ‘‘far below its value,” and since Constable himself was under 
 some obligation to Mr. Tinney for services rendered, the reverend 
 gentleman always alluded to the picture as “‘our joint present.” 
 The friendship and admiration of Fisher was a great encour- 
 agement to Constable at this time, for though his reputation 
 was steadily growing and his landscapes were at last beginning 
 to find purchasers, it was a slow business, and unquestionably 
 his wife could not have lived’in the modest luxury to which she 
 was accustomed had not the couple enjoyed the revenue of the 
 {£8,000 which they jointly possessed. One great point about 
 Fisher was his loyal faith from the first in Constable’s land- 
 scapes, and about this time the artist seems to have realized 
 that portrait-painting never had been, nor would be, his true 
 vocation. Writing to his friend about this time, Constable 
 admits, ‘‘I fear (for my family’s sake) I shall never make a 
 popular artist, a gentleman and ladies’ painter. But I am spared 
 making a fool of myself, and your hand stretched forth, teaches 
 me to value what I possess (if I may say so); and this is of more 
 consequence than gentlemen and ladies can well imagine.” 
 Four pictures were exhibited by Constable at the Academy 
 of 1821 : “Hampstead Heath,” “A Shower,” “Harrow,” and 
 ‘“‘Landscape : Noon.” ‘The last was the third six-foot canvas he 
 had painted, encouraged by Fisher’s purchases to continue to 
 work on this scale, and afterwards became famous as ‘‘The Hay- 
 wain”’ (see illustration). Constable himself at first thought this 
 picture ‘‘not so grand” as Mr. ‘Tinney’s (1.e., “Stratford Mill’), 
 but confessed that “Owing, perhaps, to the masses not being 
 so impressive, the power of the chiaroscuro is lessened, but it 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 39 
 
 has a more novel look than I expected.’ There was in truth a 
 real novelty in this picture, but its vivacity and freshness did 
 not make anything like the sensation at the Academy that they 
 did in Paris three years later. 
 
 Opinions differ—always have differed, and no doubt always 
 will differ—as to which is the greatest of Constable’s big land- 
 scapes, but “The Hay-wain”’ is certainly one of the very best 
 and the picture which, in the artist’s own lifetime, made the 
 greatest sensation of any. It is a typical English landscape, 
 with a stormy sky showing masses of cumuli moving across the 
 blue. The farmhouse on the left is none other than “Willy 
 Lott’s House,”’ which figures in so many of Constable’s paint- 
 ings. It is identical with that depicted in “The Valley Farm,”’ 
 and its original name was “Gibeon’s Farm,” as, Mr. Herbert 
 Tompkins tells us, “may be seen by a headstone at East | 
 Bergholt, where William Lott lies buried.”’* This farm was 
 immediately adjoining Flatford Mill, and though the truth of 
 the picture to the reality is vouched for by all who have wan- 
 dered, like Constable, along the banks of the Stour, the real 
 greatness of the picture lies in the fact that it is not only a 
 faithful rendering of the actual scene, but is also an impressive 
 interpretation of a mood of Nature. It is one of the earliest and 
 most brilliant paintings of “‘weather”’ in British art. 
 
 Though Constable continued ‘to find the themes of his 
 greatest pictures in the near neighbourhood of his birthplace, 
 he did not lack opportunity to change his painting-ground. In 
 June, 1821, he visited Berkshire and Oxfordshire with his 
 friend Fisher, and made pencil drawings and water-colours of 
 
 * Herbert W. Tompkin’s ‘‘ Constable,” 1907. 
 
40 JOHN CONSTABLE 
 
 scenery around Reading, Newbury, Abingdon, and Blenheim. 
 A year earlier Constable had moved his home to 2, Lower 
 Terrace, Hampstead, and in this north-western suburb the 
 artist appeared to find themes more congenial to his powers 
 than any outside his beloved Suffolk. The truth seems to have 
 been that Constable was not a man who took kindly to making 
 excursions in search of new subjects. He wanted to know his 
 ground more thoroughly, he had to live in it, to master its 
 peculiarities, to grow familiar with it and love it, before he was 
 altogether happy to record it in paint. Further, his practice of 
 painting his pictures, even great six-foot sketches, in the open 
 air as much as possible, made a prolonged residence in one 
 locality desirable. He was not fond, as other artists have been, 
 of rushing off somewhere to make a slight sketch in a day, and 
 then working up that sketch in the studio to make a picture. 
 For these reasons the topographical range of Constable’s art is 
 limited, in comparison with that of ‘Turner and others, and his 
 principal paintings, with few exceptions, render scenes near 
 Bergholt, his birthplace and country home, at Hampstead, his 
 London home, or near Salisbury, the home of his most intimate 
 friend, John Fisher, with whom he so often stayed. 
 
 In the Academy of 1822 Constable’s principal contributions 
 were again two Hampstead landscapes and “A View on the 
 Stour, near Dedham’; but in the following year he broke new 
 ground with his beautiful “Salisbury Cathedral from the 
 Bishop’s Garden,” as perfect a work as any of his great Suffolk 
 landscapes. ‘This picture was a commission from the Bishop of 
 Salisbury as a present for his recently married daughter, who 
 wanted “‘to have in her house in London a recollection of 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 41 
 
 b] 
 
 Salisbury.”” Constable took a great deal of pains with this 
 picture, which perhaps surpasses all his other works in the 
 supreme and almost classic beauty of its design, the most 
 striking feature of which is the natural sylvan arch through 
 which the cathedral is seen. It was a theme which the artist 
 must have loved both for its own sake and for its associations, 
 and to a man of his affectionate and domestic temperament it 
 must have been an added incentive to know that his picture 
 was going to one who could not fail to be moved by the scene 
 even more deeply than himself. Yet, with everything to keep 
 his mind on Salisbury, even here he could not help allowing his 
 inalienable affection for Suffolk unconsciously to peep out, as 
 Leslie shrewdly discovered in his comment on this picture: 
 “In the foreground he introduced a circumstance familiar to 
 all who are in the habit of noticing cattle. With cows there is 
 generally, if not always, one which is called, not very accurately, 
 the master cow, and there is scarcely anything the rest of the 
 herd will venture to do until the master has taken the lead. On 
 the left of the picture this individual is drinking, and turns 
 with surprise and jealousy to another cow approaching the canal 
 lower down for the same purpose; they are of the Suffolk 
 breed, without horns, and it is a curious mark of Constable’s 
 fondness for everything connected with his native county, that 
 scarcely an instance may be found of a cow in any of his pictures, 
 be the scene where it may, with horns.” 
 
 When Constable moved to Hampstead he retained the use of 
 his studio in Keppel Street for some years, but after the death 
 of Farington, in 1822, he secured that painter’s more convenient 
 rooms at 35, Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square. He had now two 
 
42 JOHN CONSTABLE 
 
 sons and two daughters, all of whom were ill, as well as himself 
 and two of his servants, in the winter of 1822-3. His own state 
 of health, and particularly his anxiety over his eldest son John, 
 prevented Constable from finishing either of the large pictures 
 he had intended to show at the Academy in 1823. The bishop’s 
 picture, “‘A Study of Trees,”’ and “‘A Cottage”’ were all that he 
 was able to send that year. 
 
 An amusing sidelight on Constable’s private idiosyncrasies 1s 
 thrown by a passage in which Fisher thanks the artist for having 
 promptly purchased for him two old pictures that he wanted. 
 ‘“‘My dear Constable,’ he writes, “Where real business is to be 
 done, you are the most energetic and punctual of men. In 
 smaller matters, such as putting on your breeches, you are apt 
 to lose time in deciding which leg shall go in first.” 
 
 In this same letter Fisher wishes he could purchase “The 
 Hay-wain,”’ but declares “‘I cannot now reach what it is worth 
 and what you must have. . . . It will be of the most value to 
 your children by continuing to hang where it does, till you join 
 the society of Ruysdael, Wilson, and Claude. As praise and 
 money will then be of no value to you, the world will liberally 
 bestow both.” Fisher was a true prophet. _ | 
 
 In October, 1823, Constable paid a long visit to Sir George 
 and Lady Beaumont in Leicestershire, and was enraptured with 
 the collection of pictures he found there. “Believe me,” he 
 writes to his wife, “I shall be the better for this visit as long as 
 I live.” On November 25th he writes again : ‘I feel that I have 
 been at school, and can only hope that my long absence from 
 you may ultimately be to my great and lasting improvement as 
 an artist, and indeed, in everything.” 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 43 
 
 Some precious fragments of the conversations between 
 Constable and his host have been preserved. In those days 
 connoisseurs had not allowed for the effect of time in degrading 
 the brilliance of pigment, nor had the arts of cleaning and 
 restoration advanced to the stage they have reached to-day. 
 Darkness in a picture was thought to be a merit, and what was 
 merely dirtiness was often praised as ‘“‘tone.”” When Sir George 
 Beaumont recommended the colour of an old Cremona fiddle 
 for the prevailing tone of everything, Constable answered him 
 by laying a violin on the green lawn before the house. Another 
 time Sir George, who appeared to think autumn tints essential 
 in at least some part of a landscape, whatever the time of year, 
 asked : “Do you not find it very difficult to determine where 
 to place your brown tree?’ ‘Not in the least,’’ replied Constable, 
 “for I never put such a thing into a picture.” 
 
 One of the chief reasons why Constable had so much difficulty 
 in getting his landscapes accepted as the masterpieces which 
 they really were, was because he ignored these conventions, 
 based on a misunderstanding of the Old Masters, and looked at 
 Nature for himself and endeavoured to paint the scenes he saw 
 in their true colours. 
 
 The ridiculous and, to us, almost incredible length to which 
 this craze for brown landscapes was carried in the eighteenth 
 and early nineteenth centuries is typically exemplified by one 
 Matthews, whose ‘“‘Diary of an Invalid’’ enjoyed a considerable 
 popularity in the early part of the last century. Commenting 
 on the collection of pictures in the Doria Palace, this wiseacre 
 wrote : ““Gaspar Poussin’s green landscapes have no charm for 
 me. The fact seems to be, that the delightful green of Nature 
 
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 cannot be represented in a picture. Our own Glover has 
 perhaps made the greatest possible exertions to surmount the 
 difficulty, and give with fidelity the real colours of Nature; but 
 I believe the beauty of his pictures is in an inverse ratio to their 
 fidelity; and that Nature must be stripped of her green livery, 
 and dressed in the browns of the painters, or confined to her 
 own autumnal tints in order to be transferred to canvas.” 
 
 Needless to remark, when Constable came across this passage 
 he was filled with indignation, but it is worth remembering, 
 because it shows us so clearly how the great artist who persisted 
 in painting Nature in her “‘green livery’? was thereby defying 
 the most cherished artistic convention of his day. 
 
 In January, 1824, a Frenchman, who in the previous year 
 had tried to purchase ‘The Hay-wain,” again approached 
 Constable. Faithful to an old understanding, the artist informed 
 Fisher of the proposal. ‘‘Let your ‘Hay Cart’ go to Paris by all 
 means,” his friend replied. “I am too much pulled down by 
 the agricultural distress to hope to possess it. I would, I think, 
 let it go at less than its price for the sake of the éclat it may - 
 give you. The stupid English public, which has no judgment 
 of its own, will begin to think there is something in you if the 
 French make your works national property. You have long lain 
 under a mistake; men do not purchase pictures because they 
 admire them, but because others covet them.” Eventually, 
 Constable sold ‘“’The Hay-wain,”’ another large picture, “The 
 Bridge,” and a small picture of “Yarmouth” for {250 to the 
 Frenchman, who hastened to take his treasures to France. 
 When “The Hay-wain”’ was exhibited that summer in the Paris 
 Salon, then held in the Louvre, it was the picture of the year, 
 
 D 
 
48 JOHN CONSTABLE 
 
 and created immense excitement among the artists. Delacroix, 
 one of the leading French painters and colorists of the time, 
 was so amazed by its brilliance that on Varnishing Day he 
 completely repainted his own picture, ‘The Massacre of Scio,” 
 which hung near by, in order that he might heighten its effect 
 and endure the competition the better. Further, Constable’s 
 picture was not merely a nine-days’ wonder, but had a lasting 
 influence on French landscape painting. His influence per- 
 meated the group afterwards known as the Barbizon School, 
 and Rousseau, Daubigny, Dupré, and others were among the 
 first to hail him as master. There was a considerable desire for 
 the French Government to purchase ““The Hay-wain,” but the 
 owner asked 12,000 francs, which was considered prohibitive. 
 Constable, however, was awarded a gold medal, and shortly 
 afterwards ““The Hay-wain”’ was sold for £400. Forty-two years 
 later it was sold for £1,365, and in 1886 it was presented to the 
 National Gallery, London, by Mr. Henry Vaughan. So England 
 regained a masterpiece which it deserved to lose. 
 
 This French appreciation of Constable’s art not only helped 
 him in London, as Fisher prophesied, but also opened up a 
 new market for Constable’s landscapes. ‘That same June an 
 unknown French gentleman and his wife called on Constable 
 and “‘ordered a little picture,’ and before this Constable had 
 undertaken to get ‘“‘seven pictures of a small size” ready for 
 Paris by August. Nevertheless, the artist was by no means free 
 from money troubles, brought about chiefly by recurrent ill- 
 nesses in his family, which added to his expenses and his 
 anxieties. In 1825 his wife presented him with a third daughter, 
 and this year, as in the previous one, Constable kept his family 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 49 
 
 at Brighton for the sake of their health during a good part of 
 the summer, while he himself stayed hard at work in town, and 
 could not remain with them for long. 
 
 His principal picture in the exhibition of 1825 was ‘‘The 
 Lock”’—that is to say, ‘“Dedham Lock,” and still better known 
 under the title of “The Leaping Horse.”’ This picture, now in 
 the Diploma Gallery at Burlington House, is usually considered 
 one of the artist’s finest works, unsurpassed for its energy and 
 movement. Leslie gives an interesting account of the incident 
 which gives the painting its popular title. ‘““The chief object in 
 its foreground,” he writes, ‘“‘is a horse, mounted by a boy, 
 leaping one of the barriers which cross the towing paths along 
 the Stour . . . to prevent the cattle from quitting their bounds. 
 As these bars are without gates, the horses, which are of a 
 much finer race, and kept in better condition than the wretched 
 animals that tow the barges near London, are all taught to leap; 
 their harness ornamented over the collar with crimson fringe 
 adds to their picturesque appearance ; and Constable, by availing 
 himself of these advantages, and relieving the horse, which is of a 
 dark colour, upon a bright sky, made him avery imposing object.”’ 
 
 Preparatory to painting this big picture, Constable, according 
 to his habit, made a six-foot sketch of the same subject on the 
 spot. This large sketch is now in the Victoria and Albert 
 Museum, and it is exceedingly instructive to compare this 
 sketch with the painting at Burlington House. One great 
 difference between the two pictures is that whereas, in the 
 sketch, the willow tree on the towing path is further to our 
 right in front of the barrier and the leaping horse, in the finished 
 picture Constable has deliberately moved this willow tree 
 
50 JOHN CONSTABLE 
 
 further to the left and placed it behind the horse, thereby con- 
 siderably improving the rhythmic design of the composition, 
 the main line of which now flows diagonally from the mass of 
 trees on the extreme left, over the top of the willow, through 
 the horse, and is completed by the sloping timber supporting 
 the wooden bridge in the foreground to our right. 
 
 This change in the relative positions of the horse and the 
 willow is exceedingly important, because it proves that when 
 Constable called himself a “natural painter’? he did not mean 
 that he intended to copy Nature exactly as he saw it before him 
 without any reference to the laws of design and science of 
 composition. His aim always was to preserve the effect of 
 general truth, but in the manipulation of details he allowed 
 himself that latitude of arrangement which is essential to the 
 science of picture-making. Vigorous and fine as the sketch for 
 “The Leaping Horse’’ may be, it is less satisfactory than the 
 picture, because our eyes, falling downwards from the clump 
 of trees to the horse, are jerked upwards again by the perpendi- 
 cular lines of the willow. In the larger painting at Burlington 
 House we have no similar distraction or interruption, but all 
 flows smoothly together, gaining thereby for the picture an 
 increased harmony and rhythm and unity of effect. Constable 
 records the change made in this picture in his own diary, in 
 which the following entry occurs :— , 
 
 ‘September 7th.—Got up early. Set to work on my large 
 picture; took out the old willow stump by the horse, which has 
 improved the picture much; made one or two other alterations.” 
 
 From this we learn two things: firstly, that when originally 
 exhibited the large picture must have resembled the South 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS st 
 
 Kensington sketch more closely, and, secondly, that the picture 
 did not find a purchaser by the time the Academy had closed. 
 
 Constable had sold two other landscapes he exhibited at the 
 Academy, again to an entire stranger (Mr. Francis Darby, of 
 Colebrook Dale), but his pleasure in this renewed success was 
 soon overclouded by his anxiety over the health of his son 
 John, who was very ill indeed. About this time there is a gap 
 in Constable’s correspondence, possibly because he was too 
 worried to write much to his friends, but we can gain some idea 
 as to the state of his mind and of his finances from a letter 
 written to him on August 12th, by Fisher. The good cleric 
 offers to take the sick boy into his own house and give him “‘the 
 best advice the country affords, with sea air, sea bathing, and 
 good food,”’ or, alternatively, if Constable thinks it preferable, 
 to take one of his healthy boys and look after him. “As for 
 money matters,’ he continues, “‘do not make yourself uneasy. 
 Write for anything you want, and send me any picture, in 
 pledge, you think proper. Your family or yourself shall have 
 the difference whenever it is called for. Whatever you do, 
 Constable, get rid of anxiety. It hurts the stomach more than 
 arsenic. It generates only fresh cause for anxiety by producing 
 inaction and loss of time.” 
 
 While acknowledging himself “overcome by your kind and 
 most friendly letter,’ Constable did not take advantage of this 
 offer, but instead sent all his family again to Brighton, where 
 the boy’s health seems to have improved. In the same letter 
 Constable craves Fisher’s forgiveness for having lent his 
 picture ‘“The White Horse”’ to an exhibition at Lille. It is a 
 little difficult to understand why Constable did not send ““The 
 
52 JOHN CONSTABLE 
 
 Leaping Horse” to this exhibition. He liked it himself, speaking 
 of it once as “silvery, windy, and delicious; all health, and the 
 absence of everything stagnant.” If the general public did not 
 warm to it then, as it has done later, it was highly praised not 
 only by its author’s friends, but by independent artists whose — 
 unsolicited tributes ought to have been gratifying. 
 
 One of the most eloquent appreciations uttered concerning 
 this famous picture came from the mezzotinter, S. W. Reynolds, 
 who undertook to engrave it at his own risk. Writing to 
 Constable, he said : “It 1s, no doubt, the best of your works, 
 true to Nature, seen and arranged with a professor’s taste and 
 judgment. The execution shows in every part a hand of experi- 
 ence; the colouring is sweet, fresh, and healthy; bright, not 
 gaudy, but deep and clear. Take it for all in all, since the days 
 of Gainsborough and Wilson, no landscape has been painted 
 with so much truth and originality, so much art, so little 
 artifice.” Illness overtook Reynolds while he was working on 
 this, and he did not live to complete his plate; but the subject 
 was afterwards engraved by David Lucas. 
 
 Early in 1826 Constable was able to inform his friend Fisher 
 that he was the recipient of another gold medal from France, 
 awarded him at Lille, where he had sent ‘“The White Horse.”’ 
 But while his fame was extending and his reputation growing, 
 the artist was still in difficulties, for in the same letter he 
 confesses : “‘My large picture is at a standstill owing to the 
 ruined state of my finances.” This large picture was probably 
 “The Opening of Waterloo Bridge,” of which Constable had 
 made a sketch so far back as 1817, but though he worked on the 
 subject from time to time, he had not yet been able to complete 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 53 
 
 the large picture. To gain bread and butter for his family and 
 to pay the doctor’s bills, he could not afford to give the time 
 necessary to the continuing of this work, but had to turn to 
 something more immediately profitable, the execution of 
 various commissions which he had on hand. This is what he 
 means, no doubt, in his letter to Fisher; but, having laid aside 
 the Waterloo Bridge picture, Constable was able to set to work 
 this spring on another good sized painting. This was “The 
 Cornfield”’ (see illustration), which, if one may judge by the 
 extent to which it has been reproduced, is to-day the most 
 popular of all Constable’s pictures. 
 
 In April he writes to his friend Fisher : “I have dispatched a 
 large landscape to the Academy, upright, of the size of the 
 ‘Lock,’ but a subject of a very different nature; inland corn 
 fields, a close lane forming the foreground; it is not neglected 
 in any part; the trees are more than usually studied, the 
 extremities well defined, as well as the stems; they are shaken 
 by a pleasant and healthful breeze at noon, 
 
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 while now a fresher gale 
 ‘““ “Sweeping with shadowy gusts the fields of corn,’ etc. 
 
 ‘I am not, however, without my anxieties, though I have not 
 neglected my work, or been sparing of my pains. ... I am 
 much worn, having worked hard, and have now the consolation 
 of knowing I must work a great deal harder, or go to the work- 
 house; I have some commissions, however, and I do hope to 
 sell the present picture. threatens me with having to 
 paint his portrait. 
 
 
 
 ‘* “Angels and ministers of grace, defend me !’ 
 

 
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THE MIDDLE YEARS 57 
 
 ‘He is hospitable, but there is a coarseness about him that is 
 intolerable.” 
 
 Picture it ! Constable is now fifty years old, he is already the 
 painter of immortal landscapes, and still he is not free from 
 the fear of portrait-painting, that one sure refuge for the 
 impecunious artist, because it is an ever-present demand firmly 
 found on the impregnable rock of human vanity! By this 
 time, at any rate, Constable has learnt to dread portraits and is 
 conscious that it is unworthy of his true genius to undertake them. 
 
 The exact locality of the scene depicted in “The Cornfield”’ 
 has been a matter of some dispute. Once it was thought to be 
 a scene in Essex, but later was found to be a field in Suffolk, 
 about one mile from the Stour. The church in the picture was 
 long thought to be that of Dedham, but in 1869 one of the 
 artist’s sons pointed out that Dedham Church is farther to the 
 - right, beyond the field of the picture. We are bound to conclude, 
 therefore, that the church tower, seen among the trees in the 
 background, is justified not by the facts, but by the licence 
 permitted to an artist; its presence here is a further proof that 
 the artist was not afraid to “‘arrange”’ his subjects, that Constable 
 was not the slave, but the master of Nature. Contrary to the 
 artist’s expectations, this lovely picture remained unsold, but 
 after Constable’s death it was bought for £315 by “an associa- 
 tion of gentlemen” and presented to the National Gallery. 
 
 In the November of this year the Constable family was 
 increased by the addition of a sixth child, a third son, and in 
 the following year (1827) the artist moved to “‘a comfortable 
 little house in Well Walk, Hampstead’’—which still stands now 
 much as it was in Constable’s day—and only retained a part of 
 
58 JOHN CONSTABLE 
 
 the premises in Charlotte Street for a studio and showroom. 
 To the Academy this year Constable sent a large painting of 
 “The Marine Parade and Chain Pier at Brighton,” and smaller 
 landscapes of “Hampstead Heath” and “A Water Mill at 
 Gillingham, Dorset.”’ 
 
 The next year (1828) opened well. In January Mrs. Constable 
 gave birth to another son, named Lionel Bicknell; of two land- 
 scapes by Constable, in the Academy, one, “Hampstead 
 Heath,” was bought by Chantrey the sculptor, and the other, 
 “Dedham Vale,’ was highly praised, and pronounced by the 
 artist to be “‘perhaps my best”’; the grief of Mrs. Constable in 
 losing her father was mitigated by learning that Mr. Bicknell 
 had left her and her husband £20,000. 
 
 “This I will settle on my wife and children” writes Constable 
 to Fisher, “‘that I may do justice to his good opinion of me. It 
 will make me happy, and I shall stand before a six-foot canvas 
 with a mind at ease, thank God !” 
 
 This letter is particularly interesting, because in it Constable 
 gives some account of the current exhibition at the Academy, 
 alluding particularly to the work of his great rival: ““Turner has 
 some golden visions, glorious and beautiful; they are only visions, 
 but still they are art, and onecould live and die withsuch pictures.” 
 
 For the rest, Constable thought : “The exhibition is poor; 
 but though the talent is small, its produce in money has been 
 very great; {150 per diem, perhaps, on an average.’”’ These 
 satisfactory takings for entrance-fees and catalogues were 
 evidently not affected by the presence of “‘Some portraits that 
 would petrify you,” as Constable remarked to Fisher. 
 
 But, alas, at the moment when the artist was congratulating 
 
THE MIDDLE YEARS 59 
 
 himself that his mind could now be at ease, fresh troubles were 
 brewing ! In the spring he had been called to Flatford by the 
 serious illness of his brother, Abram Constable, and from 
 Flatford he was recalled to London by the illness of his wife, 
 who never really got over her last confinement. Constable took 
 her to Brighton in the early summer, and when she returned to 
 Hampstead in August he was cheered because “‘her cough is 
 pretty well gone,”’ though anxious because she was still ‘“‘sadly 
 thin and weak.’’ But though Constable tried to believe his wife 
 was getting stronger, and friends tried to confirm him in his 
 belief, she was getting worse and worse. What lay underneath 
 the “cough”’ was pulmonary consumption. At last, Constable 
 could no longer deceive himself, but though he “appeared in 
 his usual spirits’? while he was in his wife’s presence, Leslie 
 tells us one November day how, ‘“‘before I left the house, he 
 (Constable) took me into another room, wrung my hand, and 
 burst into tears, without speaking.”? Mrs. Constable died on 
 November 23rd that year, and her husband never wholly 
 recovered from the blow of her loss. 
 
 By one of life’s little ironies, the official acknowledgment of 
 Constable’s talent came swiftly now he was deprived of the 
 partner of his joys and sorrows. On February 10, 1829, 
 Constable was elected an Academician. That this well-merited 
 distinction should have arrived so late is, as Leslie has said, 
 ‘“‘a proof that the progress of an original style of art, in the 
 estimation even of artists, is very slow.’’ Constable himself, 
 though naturally pleased at his election, also felt that it was too 
 late, and could not help saying: “It has been delayed until 
 I am solitary, and cannot impart it.” 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 Last YEARS 
 
 MONG the many who hastened to condole with 
 A Constable on the loss of his wife was his old friend 
 
 Archdeacon Fisher, whose advice was as follows: 
 ‘“‘For your comfort, during the trial upon you for the exercise 
 of your patience, you should apply yourself rigidly to your 
 profession. Some of the finest works of art, and most vigorous 
 exertions of intellect, have been the result of periods of distress. 
 Poor Wilson painted all his finest landscapes under the pressure 
 _ of sorrow.” Perhaps this advice was as good as any that could 
 be given to the sorrowing widower, but, however well-inten- 
 tioned, one suspects its accuracy. In the case of Richard Wilson 
 in particular we know that penury restricted his production of 
 paintings, and his finest landscapes were probably painted in 
 the brighter intervals of his sad career. 
 
 To say that Constable produced all his best paintings before 
 his wife’s death would certainly be rash, but it can confidently 
 be asserted that never afterwards did he do more than equal 
 what he had done before. Now that he was relieved of all 
 financial anxiety, he was hampered by other troubles; he was 
 apt to be depressed in spirits and, as the years went on, his 
 health suffered, rheumatism attacked him from time to time, 
 and once for three weeks he was unable to hold a brush in his 
 hand. Nevertheless, in the main he followed Fisher’s advice 
 
 and sought to forget his sorrow in work. 
 60 
 
LAST YEARS 61 
 
 Early in 1829 he commenced a great project, namely, the 
 publication of an engraved record of characteristic examples of 
 his landscape. In this undertaking he was fortunate in securing 
 the co-operation of an engraver, David Lucas, who in his own 
 way was as great a genius as Constable himself. Sir C. J. 
 Holmes, the present Director of the National Gallery, has not 
 hesitated to assert that Lucas’s plates of ‘Mr. Constable’s 
 English Landscape” form ‘‘the most magnificent series of 
 landscape mezzotints ever produced.” Greatly as we admire 
 the hand of Lucas, who executed these engravings, we shall do 
 well to remember that this hand was constantly under the 
 control of the master-painter himself. During the preparation 
 and engraving of each plate Constable was in constant com- 
 munication with Lucas, supervising the work, discussing difh- 
 culties, and suggesting improvements. Never before in the 
 history of art had painter and engraver worked together in such 
 close and friendly intimacy; each had regard and respect for 
 the other, and though it soon appeared doubtful whether the 
 enterprise was likely to be successful financially, both men 
 persevered to the end to attain perfection. 
 
 Begun in 1829, the “English Landscape’”’ series was published 
 in five parts, the last appearing in 1833. ‘The price of the 
 complete set was only five guineas. In a prospectus the object 
 of the series was set out as follows: “It is the desire of the 
 Author in this publication to increase the interest for, and 
 promote the study of the rural scenery of England, with all its 
 endearing associations, and even in its most simple localities ; 
 of England with her climate of more than vernal freshness, in 
 whose summer skies and rich autumnal clouds, ‘in thousand 
 
62 JOHN CONSTABLE 
 
 liveries dight,’ the observer of Nature may daily watch her 
 endless varieties of effect.” 
 
 We need not question the sincerity of Constable’s desire for 
 a more general appreciation of the beauty of England’s rural 
 scenery, if we surmise that he also had another object in view 
 in publishing the series. He was well aware of the purblindness 
 of his own generation as regards Nature, and of its prejudice 
 against his own ‘‘natural” landscape, and he no doubt hoped 
 that these engravings would help the public to understand 
 better and enjoy more fully his paintings. In the preface to the 
 publication he stated the case for his own style with moderation 
 and dignity. 
 
 “In art,” he wrote, ‘‘there are two modes by which men aim 
 at distinction. In the one, by a careful application to what 
 others have accomplished, the artist imitates their works, or 
 selects and combines their various beauties; in the other, he 
 seeks excellence at its primitive source, Nature. In the first, he 
 forms a style upon the study of pictures, and produces either 
 imitative or eclectic art; in the second, by a close observation 
 of Nature, he discovers qualities existing in her which have 
 never been portrayed before, and thus forms a style which is 
 original. ‘The results of the one mode, as they repeat that with 
 which the eye is already familiar, are soon recognized and 
 estimated, while the advances of the artist in a new path must 
 necessarily be slow, for few are able to judge of that which 
 deviates from the usual course, or are qualified to appreciate 
 original studies.”’ 
 
 The first plate engraved was ‘‘Dedham Mill,” made from a 
 slight sketch, but never again did Constable put anything but 
 
LAST YEARS 63 
 
 a finished work in Lucas’s hands. Indeed, the selection of the 
 subjects gave the painter as much anxiety as the progress of the 
 engraving, and as an example of his fastidiousness and exacting 
 care in this respect it may be mentioned that, chiefly on this 
 account, he rejected five plates that Lucas had finished. 
 
 In its complete form, as published in 1833, the “English 
 Landscape”’ consisted of twenty-two plates with a frontispiece, 
 “House and Grounds of the late Golding Constable, Esq., 
 East Bergholt, Suffolk.” ‘Twelve of the plates are Suffolk 
 landscapes, three show scenes at Hampstead, while among the 
 remainder are views of Weymouth Bay, Yarmouth, Brighton, 
 Old Sarum, Hadleigh Castle, and Redhill. There should have 
 been a greater number of plates, but the work was interrupted 
 first by the illness of Constable, then by the illness of Mrs. 
 Lucas and one of her children, and the circumstances which 
 eventually curtailed the enterprise are revealed only too plainly 
 in a letter from the painter to Lucas dated March 12, 1831. 
 
 “IT have thought much on my book,” writes Constable, ‘‘and 
 all my reflections on the subject go to oppress me; its duration, 
 its expense, its hopelessness of remuneration, added to which, 
 I now discover that the printsellers are watching it as their 
 lawful prey, and they alone can help me. I can only dispose of 
 it by giving it away. My plan is to confine the number of plates 
 to those now on hand; I see we have about twenty. The three 
 present numbers contain twelve; others begun are about eight 
 or ten more, some of which may not be resumed, and we must 
 begin the frontispiece. It harasses my days, and disturbs my 
 rest at nights. The expense is too enormous for a work that 
 has nothing but your beautiful feeling and execution to 
 
BOAT-BUILDING, NEAR FLATFORD MILL 
 Painted 1815 
 In the Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington 
 

 

 
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LAST YEARS 67 
 
 
 
 recommend it. The painter himself is totally unpopular, and ever 
 will be on this side the grave; the subjects nothing but the art, 
 and the buyers wholly ignorant of that. . . . Years must roll 
 on to produce the twenty-six prints, and all this time I shall not 
 sell a copy. Remember, dear Lucas, I mean not, nor think one 
 reflection on you. Everything, with the plan, is my own, and 
 I want to relieve my mind of that which harasses it like a 
 disease. Do not for a moment think I blame you, or that I do 
 not sympathize with you in those lamentable causes of hind- 
 rance which have afflicted your home. Pray, let me see you 
 soon. I am not wholly unable to work, thank God! I hope 
 poor Mrs. Lucas is better. Dr. Davis has been to see me and 
 my poor boy John, who is very ill.”’ 
 
 In this pathetic letter the real tragedy of Constable’s life is 
 brought home to us, though the artist never regarded himself 
 as a tragic figure and, looking backwards in his latter days, 
 declared that his life had been “happy, but unpropitious.”’ 
 There was no bitterness in him, but only a deep melancholy 
 because “‘the painter himself is totally unpopular.”’ Unfor- 
 tunately, it was true; during his lifetime the landscapes of 
 Constable not only failed to find favour with the public, but 
 they were disliked by a great number of his brother artists. 
 A proof of this was afforded once when Constable was on the 
 Council of the Royal Academy. His picture “‘Stream bordered 
 with Willows’’—now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and 
 entitled ‘““Water Meadows near Salisbury’’—accidentally got 
 separated from his other pictures for the Academy, and, having 
 been put with pictures by ‘‘outsiders,” was in its turn brought 
 before the jury. Constable said nothing during a discussion at 
 
 E 
 
68 JOHN CONSTABLE 
 
 the end of which the picture was rejected, but just as it was 
 being taken out some person noticed the signature of the 
 artist, ““John Constable.’ Profuse apologies followed and the 
 other members of the jury wanted the picture brought back, 
 but now Constable intervened and forbade its retention. His 
 picture had been openly condemned, and he would not permit 
 it to be exhibited in the Academy. 
 
 Though hampered by failing health during the four years in 
 which so much of his time and energy had been poured into 
 the task of preparing the “English Landscape”’ for publication, © 
 the artist contrived none the less to keep up his output of 
 paintings and to send regularly to the Academy. His exhibits 
 in 1830 were ‘“‘Dell in Helmingham Park,” “A View of Hamp- 
 stead Heath,” and another small landscape; in 1831 he sent a 
 large picture of “Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows” and 
 a smaller one of ““Yarmouth Pier.’’ Constable had taken parti- 
 cular pains with his Salisbury picture; it was a subject which 
 occupied his attention for some years, and he told his friend 
 William Purton, of Hampstead, once that he hoped to make it 
 his “best picture.” Though less decorative, perhaps, than the 
 ““Bishop’s Garden”’ view, it is a grand and stately work, as all 
 who have seen it will agree, but at the Academy it was only a 
 partial success. It was pronounced to be “‘chaotic,” and it was 
 a poor consolation that, after roundly abusing it, a critic should 
 be forced in the end to admit “It is still a picture from which 
 it is impossible to turn without admiration.” 
 
 That even now the great landscape painter was exposed to 
 the criticism of all and sundry is most amusingly exemplified 
 by an incident which occurred this August and is related as 
 
LAST YEARS | 69 
 
 follows to his friend Leslie: ‘‘Varley, the astrologer, has just 
 called on me; and I have bought a little drawing of him. He 
 told me how to ‘do landscape,’ and was so kind as to point out 
 all my defects. The price of the drawing was ‘a guinea and a 
 half to a gentleman, and a guinea only to an artist,’ but I insisted 
 on his taking the larger sum, as he had clearly proved to me 
 that I was no artist.” 
 
 Constable certainly suffered fools gladly, and his extra- 
 ordinary gentleness, forbearance, and good humour are well 
 illustrated by his generous behaviour towards this officious 
 charlatan. 
 
 On September 9g the artist saw the Coronation, a sight which 
 roused all his loyalty to the throne : “‘I was in the Abbey eleven 
 hours, and saw with my own eyes the crown of England put 
 on the head of that good man, William IV, and that, too, in the 
 chair of a saint! I saw also the gentle Adelaide crowned, and 
 I trust, what may now be called the better half of England’s 
 crown has sought its own wearer in this instance. . . . I sat so 
 that I commanded a view of all the peers placed in raised ranks 
 in the south transept. ‘The moment the King’s crown was on, 
 they all crowned themselves. At the same instant the shouts of | 
 “God save the King,’ the trumpets, the band, the drums of 
 the soldiers in the nave, and last, though not least, the artillery, 
 which could be distinguished amid all this din, and the jar 
 even felt, made it eminently imposing. ‘The white ermine of 
 the peers looked lovely in the sun; I shall sketch some. of the 
 effects; the tone of the walls was sublime, heightened, no 
 doubt, by the trappings, like an old picture in a newly gilt 
 frame.” 
 
70 JOHN CONSTABLE 
 
 Politics, so far as we know, had hitherto had little interest 
 for Constable, but this autumn he became quite worried and 
 alarmed about the progress of the Reform Bill. It is not sur- 
 prising, perhaps, that the “totally unpopular”’ painter should 
 have had little confidence in the judgment of the masses, but 
 it is remarkable that, with his experience, he should have had 
 more faith in the wisdom of the nobility. 
 
 ‘“‘What makes me dread this tremendous attack on the con- 
 stitution of the country,” he writes to Leslie, “is, that the 
 wisest and best of the Lords are seriously and firmly objecting 
 to it; and it goes to give the government into the hands of the 
 rabble and dregs of the people, and the devil’s agents on earth, 
 the agitators. Do you think that the Duke of Wellington, the 
 Archbishop of Canterbury, and Copley, and Eldon, and Abbot, 
 and all the wisest and best men we have, would oppose it if it 
 was to do good to the country? I do not. No Whig Govern- 
 ment ever can do good to this peculiar country.” 
 
 From which we may gather that Constable was a stanch old 
 Tory at heart, though it is more than likely that this outburst 
 was not so much the result of his concern with politics as a 
 symptom that he was in ill-health and low spirits. For later on 
 in the following month, November, he informs Leslie : “I am 
 now, perhaps, quite well, and I can give you no greater proof 
 of it than by telling you that the Reform Bill now gives me not 
 the least concern. I care nothing about it, and have no curiosity 
 to know whether it be dead or alive, or, if dead, whether it will 
 revive from its ashes.”’ 
 
 In December the artist was disabled by acute rheumatism 
 —“my left side and arm prevented my working by pain and 
 
LAST YEARS 71 
 
 
 
 helplessness’ —but he kept cheerful and rejoiced to Leslie: 
 “Thank God, this right hand is left me entire.” January, 1832, 
 found the artist still in bed, but, notwithstanding his ill-health, 
 he managed this spring to complete and exhibit at the Academy 
 his big picture, ““he Opening of Waterloo Bridge,”’ upon which 
 he had been working for so many years. It certainly gave him 
 more trouble than any other picture; not only had he con- 
 tinually altered and repainted the big picture, but he had made 
 innumerable studies for it—a sketch and a small painting of 
 this subject can be seen in the Victoria and Albert Museum. 
 Yet in the end the picture was not considered a success. Even 
 Leslie calls it “a glorious failure,’ and states his belief that in 
 this picture Constable “‘had indulged in the vagaries of the 
 palette-knife (which he used with great dexterity) to an excess.” 
 Constable had laid on the pigment freely with his palette-knife 
 in order to attain brilliance of colour, but this method compelled 
 a sacrifice of detail which, as Leslie says, “too much offended 
 those who were unable to see the look of Nature it gave at the 
 proper distance.’’ Even the painter’s brother artist and friend 
 Stothard “‘shook his head and said : ‘Very unfinished, sir.’ ” 
 Constable’s ‘‘Waterloo Bridge” is what we should to-day call 
 an impressionist picture; not a detailed inventory of the scene, 
 but a general impression of its colour and movement; and 
 after all his apologies for it, Leslie stoutly maintained that 
 “the noonday splendour of its colour would make almost any 
 work of Canaletto, if placed beside it, look like moonlight.” 
 The roughness of its surface, due to the use of the palette- 
 knife, also disturbed many people, and it is supposed that it 
 was after hearing some of the criticisms passed on this work 
 
72 JOHN CONSTABLE 
 
 that the artist wrote the famous passage, found on a scrap of 
 paper among his memoranda, ‘‘My art flatters nobody by 
 imitation, it courts nobody by smoothness, it tickles nobody by 
 petiteness, it is without either fal-de-lal or fiddle-de-dee; how, 
 then, can I hope to be popular ?”’ 
 
 Constable himself was always uncertain about the success of 
 his ““Opening of Waterloo Bridge,” to which he once jocularly 
 alluded as his “Lord Mayor’s Show.” Eventually he would not 
 allow it to be engraved, telling Lucas it was “‘too good a joke 
 to be received into our church. Nothing can make it either 
 apostolic or canonical, so uncongenial 1s any part of this hideous 
 Gomorrah.” Since 1819, when it had first entered into his 
 
 head to paint this subject, he had again and again taken it up 
 
 only to lay it aside, doubting and doubtful, and he was thinking 
 about it off and on for thirteen years before he got it finished. 
 It is not to be wondered at if during this lengthy period his 
 first enthusiasm for it became cool and his original zest grew — 
 stale. Leslie probably penetrated to the heart of the matter 
 when he commented : “The expanse of sky and water tempted 
 him to go on with it, while the absence of all rural associations 
 made it distasteful to him; and when at last it came forth, 
 though possessing very high qualities—composition, breadth, 
 and brightness of colour—it wanted one which generally con- 
 stituted the greatest charm of his pictures—sentiment—and it 
 was condemned by the public; though perhaps less for a 
 deficiency which its subject occasioned than for its want of 
 finish.”’ | 
 
 An amusing story of Turner is told in connexion with this 
 picture. It appears that in the course of the arrangement of 
 
LAST YEARS 73 
 
 the exhibition at Somerset House, “The Opening of Waterloo 
 Bridge’’ was placed near a seapiece by Turner—‘“‘a singularly 
 beautiful, grey picture, devoid of any positive colour.’’ One 
 day, whilst Constable was adding further colour to the flags 
 and other decorations of the City barges, Turner came into the 
 room repeatedly. Standing behind Constable, he looked from 
 one painting to the other. Presently he fetched his palette and 
 placed, on his own grey sea, a round spot of red lead rather 
 larger than a shilling. The red lead was so brilliant, so con- 
 spicuous on the surrounding grey, that even Constable’s colours 
 paled by comparison. When Turner had left the room, Leslie 
 entered it. Constable remarked : ‘He has been here and fired 
 a gun.” Near by, on the opposite wall, hung the ‘“Shadrach, 
 Meshach, and Abednego” of George Jones. Said Abraham 
 Cooper : “A coal has bounced across the room from Jones’s 
 picture and set fire to Turner’s sea.” “The great man,’ adds 
 Leslie, ““did not come into the room again for a day and a half; 
 and then, in the last moments that were allowed for painting, 
 he glazed the scarlet seal he had put upon his picture, and 
 shaped it into a buoy.” 
 
 Hardly had Constable recovered his own health that summer 
 than his eldest daughter became alarmingly ill with scarlet 
 fever. During June her position was extremely critical, but in 
 July she got better and was able to go away to Brighton. More 
 trials, however, were in store for him. In August his “dear 
 friend’’ Archdeacon Fisher died suddenly at Boulogne, whither 
 he had gone with Mrs. Fisher to recuperate after a long illness. 
 “This sudden and awful event has strongly affected me,” 
 wrote Constable to Leslie. ‘The closest intimacy had subsisted 
 
74 JOHN CONSTABLE 
 
 between us for many years; we loved each other, and confided 
 in each other entirely, and his loss makes a sad gap in my 
 worldly prospects. He would have helped my children, for he 
 was a good adviser, though impetuous, and he was a truly 
 religious man. I cannot tell you how singularly his death has 
 affected me.”’ 
 
 All this summer, too, Constable had been very worried about 
 John Dunthorne, junior. This son of his old Suffolk friend 
 had come to London and was for many years Constable’s 
 assistant, afterwards developing into a skilful picture-cleaner, 
 whom Constable had much aided and helped to find employ- 
 ment. The poor fellow grew gradually worse during the 
 autumn, and finally died. Constable went down to Suffolk for 
 the funeral, and wrote sadly to Lucas: “I returned last night 
 after seeing the last of poor John; no one can supply his place 
 with me.”” On the return journey, however, an incident occurred 
 which must have cheered the painter considerably. “In the 
 coach yesterday, coming from Suffolk,’ he writes, “were two 
 gentlemen and myself, all strangers to each other. In passing 
 the vale of Dedham, one of them remarked, on my saying it was 
 beautiful, “Yes, sir, this is Constable’s country.’ I then told 
 him who I was, lest he should spoil it.’’ His landscapes may 
 not have been so popular as he could have wished, but Constable 
 had his admirers, and it must have been gratifying thus to 
 meet one unexpectedly. 
 
 This December, Constable SHA himself and his family 
 from Well Walk, Hampstead, back to Charlotte Street. “We 
 are all looking round with astonishment,” he writes, “‘at having 
 been so long away from so comfortable a house as this.” During 
 
LAST YEARS 75 
 
 the early part of 1833 Constable began his picture of the 
 cenotaph erected by Sir George Beaumont in his own grounds 
 to the memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds, but he laid it aside in 
 order to complete his fine oil-painting of “‘Englefield House, 
 Berkshire : Morning,’ commissioned by the owner of the house, 
 Mr. Benyon de Beauvoir. This picture was considered a success, 
 and found much favour at the Academy, where it was exhibited 
 together with “A Cottage in a Cornfield,” “Landscape : Sun- 
 set,” “A Heath,” “Showery Noon,” and three water-colours. 
 But though others praised him rather more than usual, the 
 painter himself seems to have been dissatisfied, for, writing to 
 a friend about the exhibition, after mentioning Wilkie, Leslie, 
 Phillips, Landseer, and Shee, he says : “Constable is weak this 
 year.’ This letter was written to a Mr. George Constable; no 
 relation of the painter, with whom John Constable got very 
 friendly in his last years. 
 
 A good retort was made by the painter to a captious critic 
 who said the “‘Englefield’”’ picture was ‘‘only a picture of a 
 house, and ought to have been put in the Architectural Room.” 
 Constable replied: “It is a picture of a summer morning, 
 including a house.” 
 
 During this summer Constable gave at Hampstead his first 
 public lecture, his subject being ‘“‘An Outline of the History of 
 Landscape Painting.” It was not written out, and so was never 
 published, but was delivered from notes, some of which have 
 been preserved by Leslie. From these it would appear that 
 after giving a review of this branch of the art from classical 
 times, the chief point made by the lecturer was that after the 
 death of the great Dutch painters, Rembrandt, Ruysdael, 
 
76 JOHN CONSTABLE 
 
 Cuyp, etc., “landscape rapidly declined, and during almost the 
 whole of the succeeding century little was produced beyond 
 mannered and feeble imitations of their art—the painters of 
 this period adding nothing to the general stock, as their pre- 
 decessors had done by original study, but referring always to . 
 the pictures of their masters instead of looking to the aspects 
 of Nature which had given birth to those pictures. From this 
 degraded and fallen state it is delightful to say that landscape 
 painting revived in our own country, in all its purity, simplicity 
 and grandeur, in the works of Wilson, Gainsborough, Cozens, 
 and Girtin.”’ | 
 
 Early in 1834 both Constable and his eldest son John, who 
 were now back again at Well Walk, Hampstead, were ill with — 
 rheumatic fever. The painter had a long and severe attack, 
 lasting for the greater part of two months, and accompanied 
 by severe pain. His friend and medical attendant, Mr. Evans, 
 writing to Mr. William Purton, another of Constable’s friends 
 at Hampstead, at a much later date testified : “These sufferings 
 he bore with great patience for one of so sensitive a frame; 
 and on the occasion of my visits to him, his cheerfulness was 
 generally restored, and his conversation was of the same 
 delightful character which you know so well. . . . I think he 
 was never so well after this severe illness; its effects were felt 
 by him, and showed themselves in his looks ever afterwards; 
 so that I think it may be said to have had some share in his 
 removal from us.” 
 
 Owing to this long illness Constable was unable to send any 
 oil-painting to the Academy this year, where he was repre- 
 sented only by five drawings, among them being water-colours 
 
LAST YEARS oy 
 
 of ‘The Mound of the City of Old Sarum” and “Stoke Poges 
 Church, the Scene of Gray’s ‘Elegy.’ ” In July the painter was 
 able to pay a visit with his son to his friend George Constable 
 at Arundel, with the scenery of which he was delighted. ‘The 
 castle is the chief ornament of this place,’ he tells Leslie; 
 ‘put all here sinks to insignificance in comparison with the 
 woods and hills. The woods hang from steeps and precipices, 
 and the trees are beyond everything beautiful.”’ In September 
 he visited Lord Egremont at Petworth, where he spent a fort- 
 night and “‘filled a large book with sketches in pencil and water- 
 colours.’’ Back in London in the October, he set to work again 
 on “Salisbury from the Meadows.” ‘This, according to Leslie, 
 “was a picture which he felt would probably in future be 
 considered his greatest; for if among his smaller works there 
 were many of more perfection of finish, this he considered as 
 conveying the fullest impression of the compass of his art. 
 But it met with no purchaser.” | 
 In the following April the artist wrote a delightful letter to 
 his friend George Constable, who had invited the artist’s son 
 John to accompany him on a trip to France. ‘This invitation it 
 was impossible to accept because, as his father explained, 
 young John was now extremely busy studying as a medical 
 student at London University and attending lectures on 
 chemistry, anatomy, etc. He then continues : “Having spoken 
 of the young chymist and surgeon, let me speak of the old 
 landscape painter. I have got my picture into a very beautiful 
 state; I have kept my brightness without my spottiness, and I 
 have preserved God Almighty’s daylight, which is enjoyed by 
 all mankind, excepting only the lovers of dirty old canvas, 
 
78 JOHN CONSTABLE | 
 
 perished pictures at a thousand guineas each, cart grease, tar, 
 and snuff of candle.” 
 
 The picture to which the artist here alludes was a “View of 
 Willy Lott’s House,” better known as “The Valley Farm”’ (see 
 illustration), now hanging in the Tate Gallery. This beau- 
 tiful work was painted from an early sketch, and it was the 
 only picture Constable sent to the Academy of 1835. To use a 
 modern term, it had a “‘better Press’ than any picture Constable 
 had previously exhibited there, and was bought before the 
 exhibition opened by Mr. Robert Vernon. Always a most — 
 popular work, a typical and characteristic example of the 
 artist’s later manner, “The Valley Farm” is especially to be 
 admired for its effective arrangement of the masses. While the ~ 
 scene appears absolutely natural, the design closely follows the 
 diagonal line of an orthodox classic composition. There is a 
 triangle of dark, with a little light in it, on the lower and right- 
 hand side; and a triangle of light, with a few darks in it, on the 
 upper left-hand side. ‘The house itself, in the centre of the 
 canvas, lies between these two triangles, contributing light to 
 the dark, and dark to the light section. The farm, however, is 
 not the dominant note in the picture; more important are the 
 tall trees which overshadow it, beneath which a man with a 
 punting-pole is pushing off a boat into midstream; and equally 
 important is the great expanse of luminous, cloud-laden sky. 
 Very beautiful and subtle throughout is the play of light among 
 the trees, upon the water, on the house itself, and on the shirt- 
 sleeves of the man poling; it is a network of light and shade, 
 embroidered into an exquisitely balanced composition, full of 
 art, yet with a simplicity that rivals Nature herself. 
 
LAST YEARS 79 
 
 This summer Constable gave his second lecture on landscape 
 at Hampstead, and though no notes of it have been preserved, 
 it seems probable that in it he alluded in the highest terms to 
 John Cozens, for shortly before the lecture, in a letter to a 
 friend, he writes enthusiastically of Cozens as “‘the greatest 
 genius that ever touched landscape.” 
 
 In the autumn Constable visited Worcester, where, by special 
 invitation, he delivered lectures on October 6th, 7th, and 8th. 
 Back in London in November, he decided not to begin a big 
 picture this year, characteristically telling George Constable 
 “fa size smaller will be better, and more of them; such as will 
 suit my friends’ pockets; though ’tis too late in life for me to 
 think of ever becoming a popular painter. Besides, a know- 
 ledge of the world, and I have little of it, goes farther towards 
 that than a knowledge of art.”’ 
 
 In 1836 the Royal Academy was to hold its last exhibition in 
 Somerset House previous to its removal to new quarters, and 
 that spring Constable put all his other paintings aside in order 
 to finish in time for the exhibition his picture of “The Ceno- 
 taph.”’ He had been working earlier in the year on a painting 
 of ‘Arundel Mill and Castle,” but, as he told George Constable, 
 “TI found I could not do both, and so I preferred to see Sir 
 Joshua Reynolds’s name and Sir George Beaumont’s once more 
 in the catalogue, for the last time at the old house.” 
 
 In describing ‘“The Cenotaph” in the catalogue, Constable 
 quoted the lines inscribed on it, written by Wordsworth at 
 Sir George Beaumont’s request :— 
 
 “Ye Lime-trees ranged before this hallowed Urn, 
 Shoot forth with lively power at Spring’s return; 
 
80 JOHN CONSTABLE 
 
 
 
 And be not slow a stately growth to rear 
 
 Of pillars, branching off from year to year, 
 
 Till they have learn’d to frame a darksome aisle ;— 
 That may recall to mind that awful Pile 
 
 Where Reynolds, ’mid our country’s noblest dead, 
 In the last sanctity of fame is laid. 
 
 ‘“‘ There, though by right the excelling Painter sleep 
 Where Death and Glory a joint Sabbath keep, 
 Yet not the less his Spirit would hold dear 
 Self-hidden praise, and Friendship’s private tear: 
 Hence, on my patrimonial grounds, have I 
 Raised this frail tribute to his memory; 
 
 From youth a zealous follower of the Art 
 
 That he professed, attached to him in heart; 
 Admiring, loving, and with grief and pride, 
 Feeling what England lost when Reynolds died.” 
 
 “The Cenotaph” is unique among all Constable’s paintings. 
 One might think he had the prejudices of his old friend and 
 patron in mind when he presented this aspect of Sir George’s 
 park as a brown landscape. The autumnal tints of the foliage, 
 however, were the natural result of Constable having made his 
 studies on the spot late in the autumn; it was by deliberate 
 choice, on the other hand, that he took the afternoon as his 
 time of day. Both these things were very unusual with 
 Constable, though it must be admitted that the fall of the year 
 and the wane of day were peculiarly appropriate to the signi- 
 _ ficance of the picture. Another unusual thing for a Constable 
 landscape is the absence in this picture of any vestige of human 
 
LAST YEARS Br 
 
 life. Apart from the deer in the foreground and a robin- 
 redbreast perched on a corner of the monument, there is no 
 living thing in the landscape, which is impressive, almost awe- 
 inspiring, in its solitude, and is impregnated with a deep feeling 
 of resigned sadness without parallel in the art of Constable. 
 For in all his other works, whether sketches or large or small 
 paintings, Constable is essentially a cheerful painter. There is 
 a touch of solemnity in his Salisbury pictures, in his view of 
 “Old Sarum,” but none of these equal the solemnity of ““The 
 Cenotaph.” Richly painted with loaded pigment, the picture 
 has that glittering effect so characteristic of Constable and so 
 offensive to many of his contemporaries, though the trees, 
 partly denuded of their leaves, permit the perfection of his 
 drawing of boughs to be seen more plainly than in any other 
 of his pictures. 
 
 “The Cenotaph” was Constable’s last great picture, and to 
 the superstitiously minded there seems to be something almost 
 uncanny in the coincidence that in the evening of his days he 
 should have departed so far from his usual practice and, turning 
 aside from noonday splendour and the full foliage of summer, 
 have uttered as his swan-song this sonorous tribute to the 
 moving majesty of the yellow leaf. 
 
 On Thursday, May 26th, and on the following three Thurs- 
 days at 3 p.m. Constable delivered four lectures at the Royal 
 Institution in Albemarle Street on “‘The History of Landscape 
 Painting.” Of the notes of these lectures, which Leslie has 
 preserved, the following passages are particularly significant, 
 and helpful to the understanding of the painter’s mind and art : 
 
 ‘The attempt to revive styles that have existed in former ages 
 

 
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LAST YEARS 8c 
 
 may for a time appear to be successful, but experience may now 
 surely teach us its impossibility. I might put on a suit of Claude 
 Lorraine’s clothes and walk into the street, and the many who 
 know Claude but slightly would pull off their hats to me, but 
 I should at last meet with some one more intimately acquainted 
 with him, who would expose me to the contempt I merited... . 
 
 “The young painter who, regardless of present popularity, 
 would leave a name behind him must become the patient pupil 
 of Nature. If we refer to the lives of all who have distinguished 
 themselves in art or science, we shall find they have always been 
 laborious. 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... . 
 
 “Paley observed of himself, that ‘the happiest hours of a 
 sufficiently happy life were passed by the side of a stream’; 
 and I am greatly mistaken if every landscape painter will not 
 acknowledge that his most serene hours have been spent in the 
 open air, with his palette on his hand.” 
 
 In the autumn of 1836 Constable was much occupied with 
 his children; John, the eldest, was preparing for Cambridge, 
 and Charles, his second son, who had adopted the sea as his 
 profession, was on leave prior to sailing in an East Indiaman. 
 Early in the New Year he resumed working on “Arundel Mill 
 and Castle,” a subject, as he told Mr. George Constable in a 
 letter dated February 17, 1837, “for which I am indebted to 
 your friendship. It is, and shall be, my best picture; the size, 
 three or four feet; it is safe for the Exhibition, as we have as 
 much as six weeks good.” 
 
 Alas ! “‘Man proposes . . .” The picture was never finished, 
 
 F 
 
86 JOHN CONSTABLE 
 
 though Lucas subsequently executed an engraving from it for 
 his second series of mezzotints, and ‘“‘Arundel Mill and Castle”’ 
 was considered to be sufficiently far advanced to be exhibited 
 in the Academy after the painter’s death. 
 
 His faithful friend and biographer, C. R. Leslie, saw Constable 
 for the last time on ‘Thursday, March 30th, when both attended 
 a general assembly of the Academy and afterwards walked part 
 of the way home together. ‘The night, though very cold, was 
 fine,’ says Leslie, and he recalls an incident of the walk which 
 throws its own light on Constable’s character: “‘As we pro- 
 ceeded along Oxford Street, he heard a child cry on the opposite 
 side of the way; the griefs of childhood never failed to arrest 
 his attention, and he crossed over to a little beggar-girl who had 
 hurt her knee; he gave her a shilling and some kind words, 
 which, by stopping her tears, showed that the hurt was not very 
 serious, and we continued our walk.” 
 
 All the next day he stayed in, busily engaged on his picture 
 of “Arundel Mill and Castle,” but in the evening he went out 
 on a charitable mission connected with the Artists’ Benevolent 
 Fund. | 
 
 “He returned about nine o’clock, ate a hearty supper, and, 
 feeling chilly, had his bed warmed : a luxury he rarely indulged 
 in. It was his custom to read in bed; between ten and eleven 
 he had read himself to sleep, and his candle, as usual, was 
 removed by a servant. Soon after this, his eldest son, who had 
 been at the theatre, returned home, and while preparing for 
 bed in the next room, his father awoke in great pain and called 
 to him. So little was Constable alarmed, however, that he at 
 first refused to send for medical assistance; he took some 
 
LAST YEARS | 87 
 
 rhubarb and magnesia, which produced sickness, and he drank 
 copiously of warm water, which occasioned vomiting; but the 
 pain increasing, he desired that Mr. Michele, his near neighbour, 
 should be sent for, who very soon attended. In the meantime, 
 Constable had fainted, his son supposing he had fallen asleep; 
 Mr. Michele instantly ordered some brandy to be brought; the 
 bedroom of the patient was at the top of the house; the servant 
 had to run downstairs for it, and before it could be procured, 
 life was extinct, and within half an hour of the first attack 
 of pain.” 
 
 Thus Leslie chronicles the end of the friend and master he 
 revered. A post-mortem, conducted by Professor Partridge in 
 the presence of Mr. Michele and Mr. George Young, revealed 
 the strange fact that Constable’s death was due to acute indi- 
 gestion; no traces of disease could be discovered sufficient to 
 produce a fatal result. Mr. Michele was of opinion afterwards 
 that the prompt application of a stimulant might have saved 
 his patient’s life. The great painter was laid to rest in the 
 churchyard at Hampstead, a place he loved dearly, and ten 
 years earlier, on first moving into his house there, he had 
 written to Fisher, “‘I could gladly exclaim, here let me take my 
 everlasting rest.” 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 WorRK AND INFLUENCE 
 
 a part of his life in defending the art of J. M. W. Turner, 
 
 should have been singularly blind to the genius of John 
 Constable. One would have thought that the trees in “The 
 Cenotaph” alone might have restrained the critic from rashly 
 asserting “I have never seen any work of his in which there 
 were any signs of his being able to draw, and hence even the 
 most necessary details are painted by him inefficiently.” In 
 fairness to the writer, we ought to remember that this passage 
 in his ‘‘Modern Painters”’ was published soon after Constable’s 
 death, when a vast number of Constable’s paintings and 
 sketches, with which we are familiar, were in private hands, 
 and had probably not been seen by Ruskin. We may attribute 
 his sweeping and quite unjustifiable condemnation, therefore, 
 not merely to prejudice, but also to ignorance. ‘To look at such 
 a picture as ‘“T'rees near Hampstead Church’”’ (see illustration) is 
 surely to have any doubts as to the artist’s ability to draw 
 resolved at once, and in the Victoria and Albert Museum there 
 are more than a dozen tree studies which prove that Constable 
 had as searching an eye for form as for colour. In this brief 
 survey of the life and work of the great landscape painter it has 
 only been possible to mention individually a few of his most 
 
 important paintings, but it is a literal truth that many of 
 88 
 
 |: is a thousand pities that John Ruskin, who spent so large 
 
WORK AND INFLUENCE 89 
 
 
 
 Constable’s slight sketches are, artistically, quite as important 
 as any of his largest paintings, and of a certainty it can be said 
 that nobody knows Constable who knows only his paintings, 
 and not his sketches. Some of the most precious things he 
 ever did are only about the size of the lid of a cigar-box. There 
 are some beautiful little oil-sketches of this size in the Diploma 
 Gallery at Burlington House; and, on the whole, it may be 
 asserted that the colour in the sketches is fresher and has 
 suffered less from the ravages of time than that in the larger 
 paintings. It is partly for this reason, because they are fresher 
 and because, inevitably, they are more spontaneous and easy, 
 that many artists and many shrewd judges of painting have not 
 hesitated to affirm that they prefer Constable’s sketches to his 
 finished pictures. 
 
 Constable’s insistence on his being a “‘natural’’ painter has 
 led many of his admirers and imitators astray, for it has led 
 them to believe that some of his most characteristic works are 
 just “snapshots from Nature.” Undoubtedly Constable aimed 
 at truth, all the truth that he could grasp and express, but he 
 did not sacrifice all the many other qualities which a picture 
 should possess to this one pursuit. His pictures indeed have 
 the appearance of truth, but when examining more closely 
 “The Leaping Horse’ and “The Valley Farm’ we have seen 
 how carefully the parts have been arranged and ordered to form 
 a harmonious and decorative whole. Much less than justice 
 has been done to Constable as a designer, chiefly because he 
 did not compel all Nature to fit into a preconceived geometrical 
 arrangement, but extracted his designs from the manifold 
 patterns which Nature herself affords to a diligent observer. 
 
90 JOHN CONSTABLE 
 
 In his desire to give a true general impression of Nature, 
 Constable was, within his limits, an impressionist; but in his 
 day the scientific investigation of colour had not been carried 
 so far as it was fifty years later, and the colour of shadows was 
 not an inquiry which he pursued as did his successors, those 
 great French painters of the nineteenth century known as the 
 Impressionist School. It was the peculiar merit and glory of 
 Constable that he searched out and stated fearlessly the colour 
 in Nature’s lights; in this he was a true pioneer and pointed out 
 the way to succeeding generations. Not only do the facts of 
 history altogether justify the statement that “‘in England, the 
 influence of Constable on his successors has been wider than 
 that of any other English landscape painter’; we can go still 
 further and say that Constable is one of the very few British 
 artists who have attained to international rank and been a 
 world influence. No other British painter—not even Turner 
 himself—is more honoured to-day in France and on the Con- 
 tinent generally than Constable. Talk to any Parisian artist 
 about British painting and the name of John Constable will be 
 the first to leap to his lips. ‘The influence of the Suffolk miller’s 
 son first showed itself in Paris, and it has remained a potent 
 force there ever since. : 
 
 That the French Romanticists and Impressionists were both 
 indebted to Constable is one of the commonplaces of art 
 criticism, but my friend Mr. S. C. K. Smith, in his “Looking 
 at Pictures,’’ has made some shrewd observations on a point in 
 which the tormer differed from Constable. 
 
 “Tf it is to France that we owe the first appreciation by 
 artists of the work of Constable,” he writes, “‘it is because they 
 
WORK AND INFLUENCE gI 
 
 
 
 grasped, not so much the love of Nature which inspired it, as 
 the possibilities of landscape as a medium of individual expres- 
 sion. For landscape has to them no marked personality of its 
 own, and for that very reason can be treated by the artist as the 
 unclouded mirror of his own personality, as he sees it himself. 
 Constable talks to you about the joy of rain among the trees. 
 The painters of the Barbizon School talk to you each about 
 himself. ‘Their painting is not unconsciously, but consciously, 
 temperamental. It is not so much himself, as his ideal of 
 himself that the French painter puts into his picture, the 
 abstract quality for which he feels the most sympathy.” 
 
 In this there is much truth. Constable was different, his 
 sympathies were given to the concrete rather than to the 
 abstract, and for him not only was Suffolk Suffolk and Wiltshire 
 Wiltshire, but every stump, stile, lane, and field in his beloved 
 East Bergholt had a marked personality of its own. He was a 
 painter who did not seek to save his own personality, and 
 therefore did not lose it when he became absorbed in Nature. 
 No painting is really more personal than his; we can all recog- 
 nize the touch of Constable, but the expression of his own 
 personality is unconscious, not deliberate. In his art, as in his 
 life, John Constable was self-forgetful, and he became one of 
 the greatest of the world’s landscape artists because he was one 
 of the most disinterested of painters. 
 
 The learned Director of the National Gallery has usefully 
 reminded us that we must not press too far our claims con- 
 cerning Constable’s influence on French painting, pointing out 
 that in 1824 Rousseau, “the pioneer of landscape painting in 
 France,’ was then only twelve years old, that Corot’s work 
 
92 JOHN CONSTABLE 
 
 “retained its pleasant youthful stiffness for years after 
 Constable’s death,” and that French painters in general would 
 have had “‘nothing but the memory of a few works of Constable’s 
 shown at the Salon to direct their sympathetic enthusiasm.” I 
 am not sure but that Sir C. J. Holmes has under-estimated the 
 number of Constable’s paintings which were to be seen in 
 Paris during the early half of the last century, for we know 
 from Leslie that several Frenchmen were among his patrons 
 towards the latter end of his life, and it is possible that some of 
 these pictures were known to and studied by the younger 
 French landscape painters. Nevertheless, if it be true, as Sir 
 C. J. Holmes asserts, that “it is as a tradition rather than as a 
 reality that his influence has persisted,” this only amounts to 
 saying that Constable’s attitude towards Nature has made an 
 even greater impression on the world than his renderings of 
 her scenery. ‘This indeed is tacitly admitted by the writer 
 when he says that Constable’s connexion with the moderns 
 ‘“‘rests on the sincerity with which he looked at Nature, a 
 sincerity which only a few years ago was commonly regarded as 
 the one thing needful to great art. And of this sincerity 
 Constable was the conspicuous champion. ‘Turner was sincere 
 to himself rather than to Nature. Crome was sincere to Nature, 
 but never allowed his sincerity to overrule his innate reverence 
 for fine painting. Cox and De Wint were sincere, but their 
 outlook was less wide, their truthfulness less unrelenting than 
 Constable’s. So it has come about that Constable is generally 
 held to be the father of modern landscape, both in France and 
 England.” 
 
 In this matter of paternity, however, we must not forget that 
 
WORK AND INFLUENCE 93 
 
 before Constable there was Richard Wilson, whose art the later 
 painter so greatly admired. In a letter dated 1823, Constable 
 wrote : “I went to the gallery of Sir John Leicester to see the 
 English artists. I recollect nothing so much as a large solemn, 
 bright, warm, fresh landscape by Wilson, which still swims in 
 my brain like a delicious dream. Poor Wilson. Think of his 
 fate, think of his magnificence. ... He was one of those 
 appointed to show the world the hidden stores and beauties 
 of Nature.”’ 
 
 But Wilson, whose art even to-day is underrated and much 
 misunderstood, is known chiefly by his Italian landscapes, 
 though he was really the first to show the world the supreme 
 beauty of English scenery. No doubt Constable knew Wilson’s 
 English landscapes and loved them, but somehow, though he 
 was a real pioneer in this direction, attention always has been 
 and still is directed to Wilson’s Italian subjects rather than to 
 his English scenes. The very fact that he never painted outside 
 his own homeland has contributed to make Constable pre- 
 eminent as the painter of the English countryside. 
 
 Again, it has been said that Constable’s “first desire was to 
 reproduce God’s light in his work, and to give a true and full 
 impression of Nature both in colour and chiaroscuro.”’ ‘This is 
 true enough, but it is not true only of Constable. Wilson also 
 aimed at giving Nature’s true colouring and was not afraid to 
 portray her in her green livery, as all who know his ‘Thames 
 at Twickenham” and “View near Oxford” will agree. Wilson 
 also, and Claude before him, strived above all things to repro- 
 duce “‘God’s light”’ in their pictures; but there is this profound 
 difference in their lighting that, while with Claude and Wilson 
 
94 JOHN CONSTABLE 
 
 light was something still, steady, and glowing, with Constable 
 it was something alive, quivering, and vibrating. This was one 
 of the supreme distinctions of his art, and Sir James D. Linton 
 penetrated to one of the secrets of the painter when he empha- 
 sized the fact that Constable “never failed to reproduce those 
 exquisite flickering lights caused by the day sky which fall 
 upon all objects in the open air.’’* 
 
 Let us be quite candid. In the matter of formal dignity it 
 may be maintained that Constable did not reach to the heights 
 attained by Claude and by Wilson, but—largely thanks to the 
 presence of those “‘exquisite flickering lights’’—his landscapes 
 had another quality, an air of vivacity and vitality that had 
 never before to the same degree been expressed in landscape 
 painting. Before Constable the world had landscapes that were 
 solemn, noble, dignified, and reposeful; but Constable was the 
 founder of a new type of landscape that was not necessarily 
 reposeful, but exhilarating and invigorating like the English 
 breezes that swept across the meadows and through the foliage 
 which he excelled in painting. Many painters have extracted 
 art from life; Constable was one of the rare few who gave 
 life to art. 
 
 THE END 
 
 * «© Constable’s Sketches,’’ by Sir James D. Linton. 
 
INDEX 
 
 “A CoTTraceE”  ., 3 
 mes | Cottage i in a Cornfield ” 36, 75 
 
 . A Ferry” 30 
 
 “ A Harvest- field with th Reapers and 
 Gleaners ” Ben 
 Pie fieath |’ 45 
 * A Lock ” 29 
 “A Scene in Cumberland ” 20 
 “* A Scene on the River Stour” a7 
 ** A Shower ” : 38 
 * A Study of Trees ” A$ 42 
 ** A View in Westmorland ” an 2e 
 “A View of Hampstead Heath”.. 68 
 
 “A View on the Stour, near Ded- 
 ham ” 40 
 
 © Water “Mill at Gillingham, 
 Dorset ” a. 58 
 “ A Wheatfield’? .. 4€ SPIE 
 *““A Wood: Autumn” .. ones 4 
 Abingdon, drawings of 40 
 ** Alchemist,” the .. 5 
 
 Alexander, Emperor, in London . 31 
 Allnutt, Mr. , landscape bought by 29, 30 
 “An Outline of the History of 
 Landscape Painting,” (lectures) 75, 79 
 Art, topographical range of, limited 40 
 
 , Arundel Mill and Castle ” 79, 85, 86 
 Arundel, visit to : Heh kag, 
 BARBIZON SCHOOL, The 48, gI 
 Beaumont, Dowager Lady Dee 
 
 Beaumont, Sir George, 3, 4, 42, 43, 75,79 
 Beauvoir, Mr. Benyon de, commis- 
 
 sion from. . 75 
 Berkshire, visit to .. 39 
 Bicknell, Charles, 21, 29, 32, 33, 35; 
 
 death of, 58; legacy from, 58 
 Bicknell, Maria, 23, 22, 23,:25,.29 
 
 30, 31, 32, 335 34, 35; legacy to, 35 
 Bicknell, Mrs., death of .. 32 
 Birmingham, vi visit to aEeO 
 Birth ; as ae I 
 Blenheim, drawings of 40 
 
 95 
 
 PAGE 
 ie Boat-building és 31 
 “ Borrowdale ” 20 
 * Bow Fell ” 20 
 Brantham Church, altar-piece at I “rg, 20 
 Bridgman, Rev. George (portrait) 25 
 Brighton, engraving of, 63; family 
 at, 49, 51 
 British Gallery, the, exhibits at 29, 36 
 Burial-place es coments? 
 CARPENTER, Mr. James, landscape 
 bought by 30 
 
 Cecil Street, 23, residence at. 9 
 
 Chantrey, Sir Francis mA cl.t: 
 Character, lofty moral 2, 11, 69 
 Charlotte Street, fire at, 24; return 
 
 to, 74; studio at, 41, 58 
 Children, 36, 37, 41, 42, 48, 49, 57, 
 
 58, 85; fondness, 36; ill-health, 
 
 51, 53, 67; incident, typical, 86 
 “Christ blessing little Children” 15 
 *‘ Christ healing the Sick ” hy est’s) 20 
 Claude, influence of - 4, 42, 93, 94 
 Clerical work ee oe 9 
 Cloud movements, study of Be 3 
 Colchester .. A, As ead 
 Colour : 2 89, 90 
 Constable, Abram .. 59 
 Constable, George, letters to, 75, 
 
 77, 79; Visit to, 77 
 Constable, Golding, 1, 14; death of, 
 
 333 legacy from, 37 
 Constable, Mrs. (mother), 1, 4, 20, 
 
 24; death of, 32 
 Constable, Mrs. (wife), death of, 
 
 59; illness of, 59 
 ** Constable’s Country ” 74 
 “* Constable’s Sketches ” 94 
 * Constable’s White Horse ” 37, 51, 52 
 Cooper, Abraham .. ‘ 7s 
 Correspondence, gaps in .. Tea 
 
 Cox, sincerity of .. A ee ln Os 
 Cozens, John 
 
INDEX 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Criticism, hostile 68 
 Crome, sincerity of 92 
 Cumberland, sketches made in 19 
 Darsy, Mr. Francis 51 
 Daubigny .. 48 
 Dacehien eldest, illness of | 73 
 Dawe, Mr., work for 32 
 Deal, sea-trip to 14 
 Death : 87 
 Dedham... af r, ty 4 
 “Dedham Lock ”’ 49, 53; six-foot 
 
 sketch of, 49 
 “ Dedham Mill ” cen Brayine) 62 
 “Dedham Vale” .. 58 
 Delacroix .. Spee 
 “ Dell in Helmingham Park ” 68 
 Designs : 89 
 De Wint, ance of 92 
 Diary 50 
 ** Diary of an ‘Invalid ” 43,47 
 Diploma Gallery 49, 89 
 Drawing-master, post of .. 12 
 Dunthorne, John, friendship with 
 
 2. letters TO,TOs 15 Les ter 
 Dunthorne, John, junior, death of 74 
 Dupré s ee 48 
 EARNINGS : 29, 38 
 East Bergholt, 1, 5, 13, 19, 2,24, 
 
 31, 33, 36, 39, 40, 91 
 Egremont, Lord .. oa | 
 my Englefield House, Berkshire : 
 
 Morning ”’ 75 
 
 “ English Landscape ’ series, scope 
 
 of . ; 61, 62, 63, 68 
 Engravings, series of 61, 63, 86 
 Estimate : 88 et seq. 
 
 Etchings .. as As - 5 
 
 Famity 38, 42, 48, 49, 51, 53, 57, 58 
 Farington, Joseph, R.A., death of, 
 41; diary of, 4, 5; friendship 
 with, 4, 5, 9; introduction to, 4; 
 position of, 4; studio of, 41; 
 Turner and, 5 
 Father of modern landscape 92 
 Finances 25, 29, 34, 48, 51, 52 
 
 96 
 
 PAGE 
 Fisher, Dr. John (Bishop), 12, 23, 
 40; portrait of, 23 
 Fisher, Rev. John (Archdeacon), 
 231 25) 34, 35, 37s 38; 39, 40, 42, 
 47, 48, 51, 52, 53, 58, 60, 87; 
 death of, 73; portrait of, 36; 
 tribute to, 73, 74 
 Flatford Mill .. 1, 11, 3° ete 39 59 
  Flatford Mill” .. : 25 
 French appreciation 48, 90, 9I 
 
 French landscape painting, in- 
 fluence upon 8 epeh ae 
 GAINSBOROUGH, influence of .. 9 
 Gentleness .. 69 
 “* Gibeon’s Farm ” 39 
 Girtin, influence of a De 4 
 > God's ight? 7 aS 20 OR 
 Grimwood, Rev. Dr. a ae I 
 HADLEIGH CASTLE, engraving of . 63 
 
 “‘ Hampstead Heath” .. 38 
 Hampstead, landscapes of, 40, 58; 
 lectures at, 75, 79; mezzotints, 
 
 63; residences, 4) 41, ae 74> ie 
 
 “* Harrow ” 38 
 Head, a, price for®*; 29 
 Heathcote, Lady, mother of (por- 
 
 trait) 29 
 Heathcote, Lady (portrait) | 23, 29 
 Helmingham Park, work at veel ee 
 “H.M.S. Victory in the battle of 
 
 Trafalgar ”’ Rett | 
 Holmes, Sir, C. J. “15, 61, 91, 92 
 Honeymoon 
 
 ** House and Growade Mi the face 
 Golding Constable, Esq., East 
 
 Bergholt, Suffolk” (engraving).. 63 
 Huth Sale, 1895, prices iy eG 
 ILL-HEALTH 25, 42, 60, 63, 67, 68, 
 
 70, 71, 76 
 Illness, last . 86, 87 
 Impressionist go 
 Ipswich, visit to, 9; - sketches lost, 9 
 JONES, GEORGE 73 
 KEPPEL STREET, I .. +e 36, 41 
 
INDEX 
 
 PAGE 
 LAKE CouNnTRY, visit to 19 
 ** Landscape ” II 
 “* Landscape : Boys Bathing ” 25 
 “Landscape: Breaking ae of a 
 Shower ” ; 36 
 ** Landscape : Morning ” 25 
 *‘ Landscape : Noon” 38 
 ** Landscape : Sunset ” 75 
 
 Landscapes, 25, 57, 68; contem- 
 porary, criticized, 10 
 
 Lavenham, school at “- I 
 
 Lecture, first public, 75; notes of, 
 75; point of, 75, 76 
 
 Leeds Art Gallery, exhibition at. 
 
 Left arm affected .. : 
 
 Leicester, Sir John.. 
 
 Leicestershire, visit to : 
 
 Leslie, C. R., criticism by, 5, 9, 10, 
 15, 19, 31, 36, 49, 59, 71, 72, 773 
 92; last meeting with, 86; Varley 
 incident related, 69 
 
 Bétters,.2, 5; 6; 10; II, 12, 13, 14, 
 weet ee2.23, 24, 25, 29, 30, 33; 
 34, 38, 42, 51, 53, 58, 63, 70, 73, 
 74, 77 85; 93 
 
 Lille, award at, 52; exhibit at, 51, 
 
 52 
 Linnell, sky repainted by .. 
 Linton, Sir James D., estimate by 
 London, first visit to, 4; residence 
 in; §, 9, 10 
 * Lord Mayor’s Show ” 
 Love affair, 21, 22, 23, 25, 29, 30, 
 
 31, 32, 33, 34, 35 
 Lucas, David . . 37, 52, 61, 63, 72,74, 86 
 
 30 
 ae 
 
 72 
 
 Manners, Lady Louisa 23 
 Marine drawings Spy sr 
 Marriage, contemplated, Bo 31; 
 solemnized, 35 
 Married life, 36, AI, 42, 48, 49, 51, 
 53, 57, 58, 59 
 Masterpiece, first real 31 
 Medical attendant . 76 
 “Memoirs of the ‘Life ‘of John 
 Constable,” Leslie’s Rat 
 Memoranda, famous passage in .. 72 
 Method xe 43,47 
 
 O7 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Natural History of the skies 3 
 Natural painter, a .. 13, 50, 89 
 Nature, longing for, 10; master of, 
 
 57 
 Nayland Church, picture in 15, 19 
 Newbury, drawings of .. ieee fle 
 ** Nollekens, Life of ” os <e 5 
 OIL-SKETCHES 89 
 Old Sarum, engraving of . 63 
 Osmington, honeymoon at 35 
 Oxfordshire, visit to 39 
 PAINTING, early talent for . ae 2 
 Parentage a I 
 Paris, award at, 48; . exhibits at, 39, 
 
 47, 48 
 Penmanship, early .. 2,4 
 Period, best 60 
 Petworth, visit to .. Es iyi 
 Bs Ploughing Scene in Suffolk” .. 30 
 Politics SRE Tele 
 Portraits 23, ‘24, 25, 29, 57 
 Pre-eminence, reason for .. : 93 
 Prices 37) 47 48, 57 
 Profession of faith . eee 
 Prussia, King of, in London 31 
 Purton, William .. oe 68, 76 
 RAPHAEL’S CARTOONS, copies of .. 4 
 Rathbone Place, 50, residence at 10 
 Reading, drawings of : 40 
 Rebow, General, 24; commission 
 
 from, 34 
 Redhill, engraving of ee Os 
 Reform Bill, the, politicians and 70 
 Religious nature. : LEAts 
 Reynolds, Sir Joshua LEBER GE oie 
 Reynolds, S. W. te Ly 
 Rheumatism, acute attack of 70, 71 
 Rhudde, Rev. DP 21, 225029729; 
 
 eee legacy from, 35 
 Rousseau 48, QI 
 
 Royal Academy, associate ‘of, Q7° 
 exhibits at, 11, 13, 20, 25, 30, 31, 
 33, 36, 37) 38) 39» 40> 49» 53> 585 
 68, 71, 75, 76, 78, 79; mem- 
 bership of, 59; picture rejected, 
 68; student at, 9, 10, II 
 
INDEX © 
 
 PAGE 
 Royal Institution, lectures at, 81; 
 notes of, 81, 8 
 Ruskin, John, criticism by yoga ts) 
 Ruysdael, Jacob .. a BRN hy be 
 
 SALISBURY, 23, 40; Bishop of, 12, 
 
 23, 40 
 “Salisbury Cathedral from the 
 Bishop’s Garden,” 40, 41 
 ** Salisbury Cathedral from the 
 Meadows,” 68 
 “Salisbury from the Meadows ” 77 
 *“ Scene on a Navigable River” .. 36 
 % Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed- 
 nego’ ’ (Jones) sy . Pi bees fe 
 “* Showery Noon ” 75 
 Sketches, 2, 5, 9, 10, 14, 19, 39, 40, 
 49, 71, 77; importance of, 89 
 Sky, original, restored .. 30 
 Smith, John Thomas, 5; etchings by, 
 OR letters to, 5,9 
 Smith, S. Cc. 1s observations by 90, 91 
 
 a Spring ” : Se Ps: 
 
 ** Stoke Poges Church, the scene of 
 Gray’s ‘Elegy’’ a RR je 
 
 Stothard, criticism by ae aed ag 
 
 “ Stratford Mill ” 3713 
 Stream bordered with Willows ” 67 
 ** Studies from Nature” .. Ae ee 
 Suffolk, inalienable affection for 4t; 
 landscapes of (engravings), 63 
 
 “ "THAMES AT 'TWICKENHAM ” (Wil- 
 
 son) ; “s enn 
 “The Annunciation” .. ay" 4 
 “ The Bridge ” 47 
 
 “The Cenotaph,” "75, 79, ‘Bo, 81, 
 
 88; Wordsworth’s lines on, 79, 80 
 “The Chemist ” A 5 
 “The Cornfield ” 53, 57; ‘locality 
 
 of, 57 
 “The Hay-wain ” 38, 39, 42, 47, 48 
 ‘The Leaping Horse,” 49, 50, 52, 
 
 89; six-foot sketch of, 49, 50 
 
 “The Lock ” 49 
 “The Marine Parade and Chain 
 
 Pier at Brighton ” ays SORES 
 “The Massacre of Scio ”’ shin ee 
 
 PAGE 
 “The Mound of the City of Old 
 Sarum” ., ys ay 77, 81 
 “The Opening of Waterloo 
 Bridge,” 52, 53, 71, 72; engraving 
 forbidden, 72 ; time taken to paint, 
 72; Turner and, 72, 73 
 * The Valley Farm” >. (4 ieagpeeneo 
 ‘* The White Horse” 
 “The Young Waltonians ” Brat: | 
 Tinney, Mr. te 
 Tompkins, Mr. Herbert .. en bee 
 Tory, stanch old .. oe Be ty). 
 Touch Me : gI 
 Turner ; e 19, 58, 72, 73» 92 
 “Trees near Hampstead Church” 88 
 
 UNPOPULARITY 67, 70, 71, 72 
 VARLEY, the Astrologer, incident of 69 
 Vaughan, Mr. Henry Se fb Nha 
 Vernon, Mr. Robert fe 78 
 Victoria and Albert Museum, cols 
 lection, 9, 19, 30, 31, 49, 67, 71, 88 
 Victory, HMS.., sketches of AF | 
 * View near Oxford ” (Wilson) .. 93 
 
 ** View of Salisbury ” a ees 
 ** View of Willy Lott’s House” .. 78 
 Vocation, choice of a oh Be 2 
 
 “¢ WATER MEADOWS NEAR SALIS- 
 
 BURY ” 67 
 Watts, David Pike, 19; portrait of, 
 
 23 
 West, Mr. Benjamin Sy II, 12 
 Westmorland, sketches made in .. 19 
 Weymouth Bay, engravingof .. 63 
 William IV, coronation of, . nog 
 
 * Willy Lott’s House” 30, 39 
 Wilson, Richard, 4, 9, 20, a 60, +3 94 
 Wind-miller ; 2 
 “Windermere Lake” sae 
 *“€ Wivenhoe Park ” ~ Pte 
 Worcester, lectures at oe ore 
 Wordsworth, lines by 79, 80 
 * YARMOUTH ” Cs Rt 
 Yarmouth, engraving OF ts A cs 
 “ Yarmouth Pier ” we Bree 
 
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