Constable/Constable and his Predecessors
CONSTABLE AND HIS PREDECESSORS
Nearly three quarters of a century have elapsed since Constable's death. During that period his reputation has increased enormously, not only because there has been time for his artistic powers to be fairly appraised, but also because he is generally recognised as the parent of modern landscape. So far has this feeling been carried that there is even a tendency to speak as if Constable's aim was practically the same as that of our contemporary painters; as if his departure from the tradition of the old masters was final and absolute. Several of the artist's sayings might be quoted in support of such a theory. Nevertheless in the admirable Lectures on Landscape, delivered towards the close of his life, and therefore, it may be presumed, representing his mature thoughts on the subject, Constable shows a remarkable acquaintance with the spirit and technical methods of his fore-runners, and a no less remarkable reverence for the results they obtained. The influence of the past, however, is not apparent, at first sight, in his large pictures, for they are undeniably modern in outward aspect. Yet, if his achievement is considered in chronological sequence, a definite connection with older traditions seems to become more and more visible; till at last one begins to feel as if that connection was the real secret of Constable's success. Before entering upon such an inquiry, it is necessary to understand quite clearly what the ancient tradition of landscape was.
When the revival of the arts in Europe had progressed so far that painters were no longer content to set their figures against a background of gilding or flat colour, the effort to represent persons in their natural surroundings brought landscape into existence. In the work of the primitives of Italy and the Low Countries we are constantly meeting with delicate renderings of natural fact—a trim town, a green meadow, woods and waters unstirred by the wind, a distant blue peak, and, almost always, a space of liquid air beyond. Yet the landscape element is kept strictly subordinate to the main matter of the picture, both in tone, colour, and proportion, while the technical treatment is as simple and precise as that employed for the figures. This held good right up to the end of the fifteenth century. Then the conditions are occasionally reversed, and figure-painting with a landscape background develops into the landscape with figures. Thus in the work of Titian, who was the first great master to cultivate both branches of the art side by side, we find landscape and figures treated alike, without any radical difference in technique.
The method of Titian, which consisted of a first solid painting (probably tempera) of a broad and simple kind, followed by elaborate glazes with transparent or semi-transparent pigment, was admirably adapted for the breadth of mass and richness of colour at which he aimed. Being a thoroughly professional painter, he realized exactly the limitations and advantages of a method which enabled him to reduce his interpretations of natural effect to the unity of tone which had already become a recognised condition of pictorial success; and if his Italian successors and imitators carried the reduction to the point of dulness, he can hardly be held responsible for their failure.
Certain foreigners, at any rate, understood him better. The influence of Velasquez upon landscape has been slight, because his landscapes are few in number, and their beauty is not of an obtrusive order. The genius of Rubens was less modest. The Autumn in our National Gallery will serve to show how he introduced many of the qualities which he admired in Titian, into the oil-method characteristic of his own countrymen. The shadows which hold the composition together are painted thinly in rich brown upon a luminous ground, and into them while still moist the lights and half lights are swept with a touch that is free to audacity, and with a most skilfully varied impasto. The scheme of colour retains more than a hint of his Flemish origin, though the hues are dexterously broken and interchanged, and harmonized at the last by a strong warm glaze. This tradition was altered but slightly by the suave accomplishment of Van Dyck, and passed into English art through the gentle genius of Gainsborough.
With some few variations, the method is the same as that employed by Rembrandt in early and middle life, the principal difference being the larger proportion of shadow employed by the great Dutchman. Rembrandt's countrymen, however, were too ardently naturalistic to be content with a system which forced nature to be ever ablaze with autumnal russet, or the glow of a golden afternoon. The Landscape with Tobias and the Angel at Trafalgar Square, and Lord Lansdowne's noble Mill, are proof enough that Rembrandt was not blind to the silver twilight that follows the sunset; but Ruysdael was the first to make a regular study of the most characteristic aspect of northern scenery—steep roofs of weathered tiles among heavy green trees, and overhead a grey cloudy sky.
The change in technique that ensued was a necessity rather than an accident. The method of Rubens was essentially transparent, and transparency implies warmth. To obtain coolness, the Dutch painters used pigments that were at least partially opaque. The method of Rubens compelled the painter to work swiftly; he might interpret detail, but could not copy it. The Dutchmen wished to copy detail, and so had to prepare a solid underpainting with which any small addition could be blended and harmonized. The method of Rubens derived much of its glow and luminosity from a free use of warm glazes. The Dutchmen painted local colours solidly upon the monochrome sketch, and, as a rule, did not depend upon strong glazes. In other respects pictorial practice was unaltered; so that the difference between the style of Rubens and Ruysdael is not a radical difference. Both obtain unity by the use of a general shadow colour which pervades the whole picture. In Rubens this is warm and transparent, in Ruysdael it is cooler and semi-opaque. Rubens painted quickly into his shadows while wet, getting great variety of texture by a skilful use of strong impasto, and relying upon a rich glaze, when all was dry, to set the colour right. Ruysdael painted more drily, more slowly, more smoothly. He was thus able to match his colours at leisure, to alter them where incorrect, and needed only a thin general glaze at the last, to bring up the quality of his painting.
This manner of working is practically identical with that employed by Claude, but Claude's spirit and subject-matter were widely different from those of the Dutchmen. The Carracci and Domenichino were content with an empty landscape formula, based on imperfect understanding of the romantic side of Titian's genius. Claude inherited this formula, and transformed it into a pleasing artificial poetry. The secret of his taste was a passionate admiration of Italy, not only for the purity of her air, the brightness of her sunshine, the shapeliness of her trees and mountains, the extent of her plains, or the clearness of her sea, but more than all for the fallen columns, the shattered walls, and the crumbling arches that recalled her glorious history. Founding his art upon the dull tradition of the Eclectics, he made the masses graceful, filled void spaces with appropriate detail, drew trees that had some resemblance to the trees of nature, painted a sea that could glitter with waves that actually seemed to splash, and spread over all a sky that was like a real sky—no convenient conventional twilight, but veritable day, with a warm sun in full view.
His sketches are even fresher and more natural than his paintings, and show how large a store of charming material he found time to amass. It must always be a matter for regret that the example of his predecessors, though it could not stifle his love of nature, was strong enough to fetter it with the formal ideals of the Grand Style. Hence come the ill-drawn patriarchs, the weak-knee'd heroes, the brickfaced nymphs, and pinchbeck architecture that are dragged in to dignify scenes upon which their presence is the one obvious blot.
Of the landscape of Gaspar Poussin and Salvator Rosa it is unnecessary to speak at length, since their method differs but slightly from that of Claude. Their touch was heavier than his, their paint was thicker and less translucent, they often worked on dark red grounds, they preferred abrupt or rugged forms, sharp oppositions of light and shadow, with rolling storm-clouds, to his gentle graceful outlines, delicate gradations of tone, and perfect serenity of summer air, but in all essentials they may be classed with him. The spirit of their work was infected, like his, with the poisonous tradition that landscape was a branch of historical painting, and the disease thus induced made further progress in the art impossible.
So lasting were its effects that our first great landscape painter, Richard Wilson, was unable to shake it off. His work, with all its poetry, its skill, its refinement, is too often marred by the obtrusion of some classical story that turns all to artifice. The criticism of the Apollo and Niobe by Reynolds proves that this was felt even in Wilson's lifetime, for Sir Joshua contrasts, just as a modern might do, the practice of introducing heroic figures into realistic landscapes, with the proper and natural use of rustic figures by Gainsborough.
Gainsborough was the first to free English landscape from the incubus of the historical tradition. Nowadays we may not find in his landscapes that "portrait-like representation of nature" which Reynolds found there, for the clouds and trees and the life of the country-side appear to us only through the veil of an exquisite artistic temperament, which passes over all that might be hard or ugly or inharmonious. In early life Gainsborough painted the oak with skill and truth, but in his mature work all except the figures and animals was generalized and idealized. The colour is so splendid, the touch so free and delicate, that the spectator cannot fail to be enchanted, though in his inmost heart he may know all the time that the deep tones of the sky, the glow and the swing of the warm foliage, are merely masterpieces of magnificent convention and like nothing that ever was upon the face of the earth.
Gainsborough and Wilson were not the only painters of the eighteenth century who helped to restore the dignity of landscape. The pioneers of water-colour drawing made no attempt to arrive at the full rendering of of the hues of nature, which was the aim of the revolution effected by Turner and Cox; yet it is wonderful how much they were able to render with their apparently scanty means. Water-colour is generally recognised as the medium by which atmospheric effects are most readily and easily suggested, and a limited scale of tone and colour only emphasizes this merit, as one sees in such drawings as those of J. R. Cozens. In spite of the poverty of his materials and an obvious lack of sound training, the vast serenity of dawn or of nightfall is expressed in his work with amazing directness and simplicity. His pale sketches are free alike from the charming unreality of Gainsborough and the sham heroics of Wilson, recalling with continuous iteration those lonely places on which one chances at twilight, where the utter silence is almost terrible. I have mentioned Cozens particularly, not only because he was the most remarkable water-colour painter working in England before Constable's time, but also because Constable himself speaks of his drawings in a manner that leaves no doubt of the great influence they had upon him; indeed, in a moment of enthusiasm he goes so far as to call Cozens "the greatest genius that ever touched landscape."
Thus, at the time of Constable's birth, while art on the Continent had practically ceased to exist, there were three distinct schools of landscape-painting in England to guide a rising artist. The classical tradition had been ably sustained by the refined taste and majestic genius of Wilson; the princely realism of Rubens had turned to delicate romance in the hands of Gainsborough; while water-colour, though still in its childhood, was already giving indications of its capacity.
Thirty years later, before Constable had finished his professional apprenticeship, all was changed. Turner had given the classical landscape a new lease of life with The Garden of the Hesperides, had eclipsed all previous painting of the sea with his Calais Pier, and was carrying forward the development of water-colour drawing from the point where his friend Girtin had left it. James Ward, Cotman, Morland and Barker of Bath had done sound work on the lines of the landscape and cattle painters of the Netherlands, but the advance that they made upon their predecessors was small compared with the extraordinary perfection attained in the same style by John Crome. Indeed, with Crome and the youthful Turner the landscape method of the old masters reached a pitch of sustained excellence unknown to Titian or Claude, perhaps even to Rubens and Rembrandt, at the very moment when, all the world over, it was to be superseded. Almost a century has passed since then, yet there is hardly a sign of any reaction from the change effected in the art of Europe by the example of Constable.
The ancient tradition of landscape was invariably founded on chiaroscuro, to which a suggestion of reality was given by the addition of a moderate amount of local colour. To supply an interest comparable in some degree to that aroused by figure-painting, landscapes were either peopled with historical or mythological figures, or were animated with striking atmospheric effects. Rembrandt and Claude proved that rustic life could provide material enough for admirable sketches, but the work of the lesser Dutchmen showed that average country scenery was by itself an inadequate motive for elaborate oil-painting. Gainsborough and Crome, it is true, made charming pictures out of very simple subjects, but they are made charming by art, and not by sincere imitation of nature.
The case of Turner is somewhat different. Turner all his life held to the ideals of the riper old masters, that is to say, his primary object was the making of splendid pictorial compositions. His naturalism was essentially secondary to that main purpose, which in middle and late life resolved itself into studies in harmonized and contrasted colours. Nevertheless, his amazing memory, observation, and skill, compelled him to use natural forms and sometimes natural colours, as his vehicles of expression; though he used them in quite an arbitrary way, and discarded them without hesitation, when there was a risk of their interfering with the scale or intensity of his effects.
Constable's attitude was the exact opposite of Turner's. Born and bred in the midst of fresh English fields and meadows, he was a sincere and devoted lover of nature before he became a lover of painting. Unlike many other painters who have been able to admire the things around them only through some resemblance, real or fanciful, to the pictures they have been accustomed to reverence. Constable saw from the first that the art of Italy or the Netherlands was not like the Dedham Valley, and that if he was to paint the elms and streams and sky which he loved, he could not do so by giving them the colour and appearance of distant countries which he had never seen. Thus, when he came to study the old masters, he did so with an unbiassed mind. Claude and Ruysdael could not teach him anything about Suffolk scenery that he did not already know, but they could teach him a great deal about something of which he was entirely ignorant—a sound way of constructing pictures—and Constable never forgot the lesson.