Constable/The development of Constable's art
THE DEVELOPMENT OF CONSTABLE'S ART
Before discussing Constable's pictures in detail, a few words are necessary as to the collections in which his work is accessible to students. London is so lucky in this respect that it is hardly possible to form a complete idea of his achievement in any other place. The comparative lack of appreciation with which Constable met during the greater part of his career has been less unfortunate for posterity than it was for the artist himself. At his death he left his family a large number of pictures and studies representing every stage of his artistic activity, and many of these, by the generous bequest of his daughter, Miss Isabel Constable, passed into our public collections some ten years ago. Several of his most important pictures had already become the property of the nation, by the gift or bequest of their former owners, so that, altogether, quite a large proportion of Constable's work can be seen and studied in the London galleries. As a matter of practical convenience, it is to such pictures that reference will usually be made. Not only do they illustrate the various phases of Constable's art far more completely than private collections, but they have the advantage of being always accessible, so that any questions relating to them can be settled on the spot.
Of these public collections, that in South Kensington Museum is the most complete and interesting, though the paintings and studies are huddled together without any regard either for sequence or decorative effect. In addition to Salisbury Cathedral, The Cottage in a Cornfield, Boat-building, and other important finished pictures, the Kensington Museum possesses the two magnificent six-foot sketches for The Leaping Horse and The Haywain, and several hundred studies in oil, water-colour, and pencil, many of great beauty and interest. The Diploma Gallery in Burlington House contains A Lock, The Leaping Horse, and sixteen small studies in oil. The National Gallery owns The Cornfield, The Haywain, The Valley Farm, The Cenotaph, The Glebe Farm, and about a dozen smaller works. Several of these were removed in 1897 to the Tate Gallery. In the Print Room of the British Museum there are some well-preserved water-colours, a number of excellent pencil studies, and two specimens of Constable's feeble attempts at etching. On the whole, even Turner is hardly so fully or so favourably represented in our public collections. Except where the contrary is expressly stated, the sketches mentioned in the following pages are to be found at South Kensington.
In the following pages I have attempted to trace Constable's progress by pictures and sketches that are at once representative and accessible. To attempt more would be beside the aim of the present series, and far beyond its scope. Viewed broadly, Constable's painting divides naturally into three periods: 1776-1805, 1806-1826, and from 1827 to the year of his death, 1837. The divisions, especially those between the second and third periods, are marked by no hard-and-fast line, but they are quite clear enough to serve as a base for practical classification. Constable's methods and style varied very greatly with circumstances of time and intention, so that to the inexperienced eye late work will have sometimes the finish and severity of a student, and vice versâ. Nevertheless, upon longer acquaintance, it is quite possible to date a sketch with approximate correctness, so steady is the growth of the artist's technical method and habit of mind.
1776-1805
The work done by Constable before his thirtieth year need not detain us long. His artistic career began much later than is usual with professional painters, and, judging from the specimens we have of his early work, it is not surprising that his aspirations should have met with but little encouragement from his relatives and friends. The four pen-drawings of cottages at South Kensington, dated 1796, are hardly the kind of thing one expects from a young man of twenty who proposes to take up art seriously. Three years later he became a student at the Academy, and worked hard at copying such pictures by recognised masters as he came across—Ruysdael, Annibale Carracci, Richard Wilson, Sir George Beaumont, Claude, and drawings by Girtin.
Our knowledge of Constable's earliest efforts would be practically nil, were it not for the collection of his son, Captain Charles Constable, which was exhibited by Messrs. Leggatt, of Cornhill, in December 1899. Besides a sketch-book containing quite childish pencil studies of Flatford Mill and neighbourhood, there were two or three pictures that must have been painted at the time of his first meeting with Sir George Beaumont. The earliest of all was a clumsy oil-painting of East Bergholt Church; the next a heavy dull view of Fountains Abbey—probably a copy from some fifth-rate English picture. The third in date, The Harvest Field, was more ambitious, being rather a complicated imitation of Gainsborough—all brown and hot yellow. He made an etching of this composition, which failed owing to insufficient biting. In a portfolio there was an elaborately stippled copy in sepia of a composition by Claude, dated 1795. Of all these works The Harvest Field alone shows any trace of feeling, skill, or invention, and except from the historical point of view they are of little interest compared with the sketches at Kensington made during his Derbyshire tour in 1801, which show what a real advance Constable had made in the five years. Though still timid and deficient in contrast, the Derbyshire views are full of air and space, and have caught something of the loneliness of mountain scenery that Girtin knew so well. In spite of Benjamin West's kindly criticism on a rejected picture of Flatford, "Remember, young man, light and shade never stand still," Constable's work for some time remained rather heavy, as one can see from the sketch dated 1802 called Landscape Evening, which shows a decided leaning towards the tone and colour of Wilson. The upright sketch of Dedham Vale bearing the same date is more successful, and anticipates the fresh natural colour of his mature style. His drawings in water-colour and pencil are more evenly skilful—the sketches of Windsor, and Eton from the Castle terrace, for instance—though they are usually slight, and indicate rather varied influences. The sketches in imitation of Gainsborough probably belong to this period, while his marine studies of 1803 are evidently influenced by the Dutch sea painters.
In 1804 he painted an altar-piece for the church of Brantham in Suffolk, where it may still be seen, though it is not worth while going there to see it. It is little more than a feeble imitation of West's religious works, and shows that at the age of twenty-eight Constable was quite unable to paint a figure subject decently. Yet, if the little picture in the National Gallery, On Barnes Common, belongs to this period, as its Dutch technique would suggest, the artist was already showing in what direction his talent really lay. Constable is still a student, and a student of the old masters, but he has learned something about traditional methods of work. He knows how to model a grey cloudy sky in the manner of Ruysdael, and how to harmonize the cool green of foliage and grass with sober conventional brown, though a natural fondness for fresher tints flashes out now and then in the gay colour of some foreground figure, or where a gleam of sunlight strikes the white wall and red roof of a cottage.
The Barnes Common may serve to mark the close of Constable's period of definite studentship. The beginnings of that studentship had been unpromising enough. His timid imitations of Ruysdael's etching, his stippled copies of Claude, his clumsy experiments in the manner of Wilson and Gainsborough, gave but little indication of genius, or even of exceptional talent. The visit to Derbyshire and his enthusiasm for Girtin had given him, at the age of twenty-five, a certain readiness in the use of water-colours, and some acquaintance with the simpler principles of landscape composition. During the next five years assiduous study and imitation of the old masters, more especially of Ruysdael, taught him much about the technique of oil-painting as applied to simple subjects and conventional effects. Thus at the beginning of his thirtieth year, though Constable could not be called an original artist, he had a very fair acquaintance with the tradition and practice of his art, and therefore a sound base for any experiments he wished to make in the future.
In fits of reaction from these technical labours Constable returned time after time to the study of the Dedham Valley. Indeed, in the constant alternation between art and nature his training bears some outward resemblance to that of Millet. Nevertheless, a great gulf really separates the two men. Constable's painting, in youth as in later life, is primarily inspired by a sincere affection for the actual objects and places he depicts. He regards them rather as things to be loved in themselves than as pictorial material to be disposed this way or that as an artist's taste or knowledge might suggest. Hence his tendency, in holding the balance between nature and art, is to an all-round compromise, and not to that abstraction and emphasis of particular facts which characterizes the best painting of Millet. Millet, thus, in spite of all his "local colour," is the property of the whole world. Constable remains the unique master of English rustic scenery.
1806-1826
The water-colour of A Bridge on the Stour (apparently that above Flatford Lock) indicates that Constable had assimilated the grand manner of Girtin as thoroughly as the science of Ruysdael. The same influence is evident in several fine drawings of Bergholt Church, which also belong to the summer of 1806, though they have an air of movement and freshness that already marks a difference between the older master and the modern. How fast the gulf widened may be seen from the sketches made during a tour in the Lake District later in the year. Most of those at Kensington represent the scenery at the south end of Derwentwater—Lodore, Watendlath, Castlehead, Grange, the crags and fells of Borrowdale, with occasional glimpses of Thirlmere, and the Valley of St. John. In the solemn View at Borrowdale, here reproduced, it is easy to trace how Constable hankered after the freshness and glitter of his native water-meadows amid the heavy grandeur of the Cumberland hills. It was among these mountain solitudes that the real Constable first revealed himself. His studies show how great an impression this northern scenery made upon him, though its character was too stern, too remote from the gentler charms of his beloved Suffolk, to retain any lasting place in his affection.
During the next two years he exhibited several of his Cumberland drawings, yet he never seems to have completed any considerable picture from them. Most of the oil-sketches made on this tour are thinly and directly painted in fresh natural colour, without any reference to Dutch traditions of brown glazes and conventional arrangements of lines and masses. The largest work of this kind with which I am acquainted is the Mountain Scene, in the possession of Mr. Lionel Phillips, which measures about 2 feet by 2 feet 6 inches. It is less successful, as a whole, than the smaller studies, and indicates that as yet Constable was unable to blend the bright realism of his sketches with the harmony of tone and colour that are needed to make a picture. Possibly this experiment may have shown him his weakness: at anyrate, during the next few years he went back to the study of the old masters with renewed earnestness. Even his method of sketching from nature was altered for a time. The little painting of Sunset, which dates from the early part of this reaction from naturalism, is laid in with solid pigment, more forcibly handled than in the Cumberland studies, and then toned into deeper harmony by a strong transparent glaze.
Much of his time during the two following years was spent in copying family portraits for Lord Dysart. Among these pictures at Hyde Park Corner were several works by Reynolds. The extraordinary influence that this communion with the older master had upon Constable may be judged from his altar-piece painted in 1809 for Nayland Church, where it may still be seen. The Brantham altar-piece, painted five years before, was ill drawn, crude in colour, and feebly painted. The Nayland picture, Christ Blessing the Elements, is freely and broadly treated in a scheme of deep liquid colour, toned with a rich warm glaze, which from the size and nature of the cracks must have contained a large proportion of asphaltum. The general appearance of the work, in fact, is far more like Lawrence than Constable. The figure is well posed, and the brushwork is clever, though rather loose in the head and hands. Judging from a rough scrawl in one of Constable's sketch-books, the size of the picture seems to have been reduced and its shape altered, when it was restored and set under glass in the reredos some twenty years ago.
To the same period we may assign the beautiful picture. At East Bergholt, Suffolk—Dawn, in the possession of Mr. G. A. Phillips. One might think it only an experiment in the manner of Gainsborough, were it not that the harmonies in warm brown and sober green which the older master handled so perfectly, are replaced by a cooler scheme of colour like that of a dusky aquamarine. The brushwork is swift and free, and no attempt is made to give a literal portrait of the Suffolk hillside with its trim hedges and scattered elms. All that we are shown is a vision of morning when the air is still dim with the mist that drifts up slowly from the valleys to melt before the rising sun, which is still low down on the horizon, so that the trees cast only obscure shadows over the sloping fields. The impression left by this infinite space and solemnity makes one almost wish that Constable had never painted otherwise.
I have mentioned these pictures at some length, because they afford a clue to the great improvement in technical skill which was henceforward characteristic of Constable's work. He continued to accept commissions for copying and portrait-painting for some years, from the wish to make an income that would enable him to claim Miss Bicknell's hand, and at one time seems to have thought well of his chances of success; for in 1812 he writes that his portrait of the Rev. George Bridgman "far excels any of my former attempts in that way, and is doing me a great deal of service. My price for a head is fifteen guineas, and I am tolerably expeditious when I can have fair play at my sitter." At the close of the year his mother writes to him: "Fortune seems now to place the ball at your feet, and I trust you will not kick it from you. You now so greatly excel in portraits that I hope you will pursue a path the most likely to bring you fame and wealth, by which you can alone expect to obtain the object of your fondest wishes." However, the sale of two landscapes in 1814 seems to have decided Constable in clinging to the branch of his profession that he really liked, and from that time forward he made but occasional experiments in portrait-painting.
Nevertheless, the time he had spent on it was by no means ill spent. Portrait-painting is good practice for a landscape painter, both because it forces him to treat a simple subject with close attention, and because it is the branch of art which has the most sound and definite technical traditions. In this latter respect it was specially useful to Constable, who had hitherto approached nature with more enthusiasm than science. After 1810 that accusation could no longer be levelled against him. His science, of course, cannot be compared with the science of a Van Dyck or a Velasquez, but it was at least great enough to enable him to do readily what he wanted to do. Look, for example, at his two little pictures of Bergholt Churchyard—one at Kensington, and the other in the Tate Gallery—and note how the solemnity of the one, the pathos of the other, and exquisite colour in each, are got by the most simple straightforward painting. The fine oil-study, Trees and Cottages (1812) (No. 324), and the Sketch of a Cart and Horses (1814), show an increasing love for fresh cool colour and stronger contrasts of light and dark, though the finished picture of Boat-building, exhibited in 1815, looks like the work of some English Cuyp, so sound is the technique, so delicate is the scheme of tone and colour, so serene is the brightness of the sunlit air. One would hardly imagine that it was painted later than the brilliant sketch engraved by Lucas under the title of "Spring," but in judging the dates of Constable's work one always finds that the style of his oil-sketches anticipates that of his finished pictures by several years.
The small pencil study of Netley Abbey, belonging to the year 1816, seems to have been used by Constable for one of the few etchings by him of which proofs still remain. He had experimented with etching in the days of his friendship with "Antiquity" Smith, but acquired little or no mastery of the medium. One print in the British Museum, apparently a scene near Salisbury, is quite respectable amateur's work; but the Netley Abbey, which must have been done at a time when his painting was strong and sound, is an utterly feeble and worthless production. Its defects, too, are not due to any failures in the biting, but are caused by ineffective design, and more than indifferent workmanship: nor is the failure unique. There are a couple of water-colours in the British Museum, and several drawings at Kensington (all bequeathed by Miss Constable), which indicate clearly that except in his oil-painting Constable was never on perfectly safe ground, and was always liable to turn out work that was utterly unworthy of a professional artist.
Constable was now in his fortieth year, and in his next decade produced much of his very finest painting. I regret that I have not here the space to deal with it in detail. In the year 1817 he exhibited the noble Cottage in a Cornfield, and the brilliant sketch of A Cornfield, now in the National Gallery. He also made the small studies in sepia (at Kensington) and in oils (at Burlington House) for The Opening of Waterloo Bridge. I think the sound and careful Study of the Stem of an Elm Tree belongs to this period. Though rather more skilful, its technique is remarkably like that of the Flatford Mill in the National Gallery, which is dated 1817. In the following year the exquisite little picture in the Tate Gallery, The Salt Box, was probably painted—a view looking northwards from Hampstead Heath, where clouds flushed with warm sunlight sail gently over an expanse of silvery blue. The first of his large pictures, The White Horse, was exhibited at the Academy in 1819, and bought by Archdeacon Fisher. Constable's price was one hundred guineas, exclusive of the frame. In 1894 the picture fetched 6200 guineas. The composition is engraved by Lucas, but it cannot be regarded as one of his happiest efforts, though the great reduction in scale may perhaps be in part responsible for the worried look of the mezzotint. The little studies in oil of The West End of Bergholt Church, and On the Stour near Dedham, will serve as examples of the force and solidity with which Constable was working at this time.
His originality, if not his merit, now received some formal recognition, for at the close of the year 1819 he was elected to the Associateship of the Academy. For the Academy of 1820 he contributed the magnificent picture of Stratford Mill, of which Arch-deacon Fisher again was the purchaser, at the price of one hundred guineas. At the Huth sale it fetched 8500 guineas. There is a good mezzotint of it by Lucas, on a large scale. Its companion in the 1820 Exhibition was the Harwich Lighthouse, now in the Tate Gallery. The Stratford Mill is so brilliant and powerful a work that it is hard to realize that the sober and heavy Dedham Mill at Kensington dates from the same year. The traces of Dutch technique seem to indicate that this latter picture must have been started at least four or five years earlier.
Some of Constable's best-known sketches were executed about this time. The noble mezzotints of Lucas have familiarized us with the desolate Old Sarum, the tremendous Weymouth Bay (perhaps identical with his Osmington Shore, exhibited at the British Gallery in 1819), and the solemn Willy Lott's Cottage. This last study illustrates admirably how much Constable could do with the simplest materials. The cottage itself still stands by the Stour just below Flatford Mill. It was used by the painter over and over again not only in small sketches but in large pictures, such as The Haywain and The Valley Farm. Willy Lott, after whom it is now named, lies buried in Bergholt churchyard, where his epitaph, recording that he lived all his eighty-eight years in the house, calls it Gibeon's Farm. The Haywain, now in the National Gallery, was exhibited in 1821 under the title of "Landscape: Noon," but remained unsold.
The sketches at Kensington and Burlington House show that Constable, while painting these large pictures in oil, was not neglecting the study of natural detail. Some of his best pencil-drawings of trees belong to the year 1820, and in the following two years he spent much time in painting skies from nature. These studies cannot claim to be regarded as pictures, but in the expression of natural colour, motion, and luminosity they can hardly be surpassed. The water-colour drawing of Old Houses at Harnham Bridge—Salisbury, made in 1820, shows how powerfully he could handle that medium, and may be compared, not unprofitably, with the later sketch of the same place in the British Museum.
Constable's large picture at the Academy in 1822 was a View on the Stour, now in the possession of Mr. T. H. Miller of Preston. Constable painted several variations of this composition, one of which was mezzotinted by Lucas and another engraved in line by W. R. Smith. It represents the Stour just below Flatford Lock, and is painted in a more sober key than most of Constable's work at this time, being in this respect a contrast to the Salisbury Cathedral, exhibited in the following year, and now at South Kensington. There for the first time we notice that tendency to paint glittering sunlight by spots and scumbles of pure bright pigment which is characteristic of Constable's later manner. He had for some years practised this method in his sketches, but the "Salisbury" is the first instance where it is used extensively in a large finished picture. He seems indeed to have had some difficulty with this work, finding that the rigid architectural lines gave the whole a formal effect without the contrast of brilliant handling and definite chiaroscuro. The fine picture of Trees at Hampstead Church, which was probably painted about this time, is handled far more quietly. At this time, too, while visiting Sir George Beaumont, he made a number of sketches in the grounds at Coleorton. Among them was a drawing of the monument to Sir Joshua Reynolds, which thirteen years later developed into The Cenotaph, now in the National Gallery.
In 1824 he exhibited A Boat Passing a Lock, possibly the picture in the Diploma Gallery which, though it bears the date 1820, looks as if it had been painted some years earlier. The date may have been added during some subsequent re-touching. In the summer he went to Brighton, where he made a large number of sketches, some of which were mezzotinted by Lucas. Those that especially deserve notice are the brilliant Brighton Beach with Colliers, the Cirrus Clouds (No. 784) at Kensington, and the study of a rainstorm passing over a grey-blue sea in the Diploma Gallery. A pencil-drawing in the British Museum shows that he visited Arundel in this year.
Constable's art was now fully matured, and he was obtaining a fair share of recognition, owing to the sensation made by the exhibition of The Haywain and other pictures in Paris. In 1825 his White Horse was exhibited at Lille, and obtained a Gold Medal; while at the Academy he was represented by one of his most magnificent works, The Leaping Horse. We are fortunate in being able to trace its evolution from the rough sepia studies in the British Museum to the large oil-sketch at Kensington, and thence on to the finished work in the Diploma Gallery. Owing to its scale it appeared unwise to reproduce the latter here, but in no other single picture are Constable's peculiar excellences more happily combined and balanced. The Leaping Horse shows his mastery of cool colour, the horse in front and the group of trees behind are most nobly conceived; while the handling is as bold and fresh as the most advanced modern could desire, without the spottiness that usually deforms all efforts at extreme brilliancy. About this time he must have made some of the best of his sketches at Kensington—the Hampstead Heath (No. 122), the Landscape with Cottage, The Grove, Hampstead, a fit companion to the well-known Romantic House in the National Gallery, and the water-colour Houses with a Church Tower (Dedham?) (No. 347).
The year 1806 marks the turning-point of Constable's career. Up to that time he had been a careful but hardly brilliant imitator of the old masters. The sketch of Dedham Vale, dated 1802, is the only work which shows any indication of the path he was afterwards to follow. When he visited the Lake District he really threw aside tradition, and sketched in the fresh colouring of nature, though he failed when he tried to employ the new scheme on a larger scale. In a sketch unity can easily be obtained by devices that are impossible in large pictures, where the composition has to be built up by elaborate machinery. Feeling that he could not as yet control this machinery, Constable set himself to learn its secrets by returning to the study of Reynolds and others of the old masters. His experiments in landscape were for a time confined to modest proportions, and he did not begin to paint on a large scale until he had assured himself of the soundness of his principles of work. The progress of his thoughts may be traced from the Dawn (1809) to the sketches of Bergholt Church (1812), and thence to the Boat-building (1815), The Cottage in a Cornfield (1817), The Haywain (1821), and The Leaping Horse (1825). By comparing these pictures one can see how Constable depended for the unity of his compositions upon a chiaroscuro sketch in cool transparent brown, into which his local colour is floated, at first sparingly, afterwards with ever-increasing vigour and boldness, till at last in The Leaping Horse we find a picture which, at first sight, looks quite modern, so entirely has the monochrome foundation been concealed by subsequent solid painting. This single series of pictures may, in fact, be regarded as an epitome of the transition from the landscape of the old masters to that of the moderns. It is also sufficient evidence that the first and greatest of modern landscape painters did not discard the elementary principles which guided his predecessors, but only adapted them to new conditions. That saying of his, "I was always determined that my pictures should have chiaroscuro if they had nothing else," was no empty boast. The most advanced modern could hardly dislike conventional fusty colour more than Constable, yet Constable did not hesitate to use a brown monochrome as a foundation for his large pictures, because he had found that without it he was unable to make a picture at all. That he learned to disguise this foundation is not the least of his contributions to the development of painting. 1826-1837
In 1826 Constable issued an interesting circular relating to the prices of his pictures. It runs as follows:—
| Of the size of 1 ft. 6 in. | 20 guineas |
| From 1 ft. to 2 ft. | 40 guineas„ |
| From„ 2 ft. to 2 ft. 6 in. | 50 guineas„ |
| From„ 2 ft. 6 in. to 3 ft. | 60 guineas„ |
| Half-length size, namely—4 ft. 2 in. × 3 ft. 4 in. | 120 guineas„ |
| In larger sizes the price will be regulated by circumstances depending on time and subject. | |
| 35 Charlotte Street, 1826. | |
Though these prices may seem low compared with the sums asked by successful men at the present day, it should be remembered that the smaller pictures were often little more than sketches which did not represent any large amount of labour or elaborate composition. The purchasing power of money, too, was greater in Constable's time, while the social aspirations (and, in consequence, the expenses) of an Associate of the Academy were then far more modest.
His principal work at the Academy of 1826 was the well-known Cornfield, one of his most powerful and vigorous works, the group of massive elm trees on the left being especially fine. The study for the donkey browsing in the hedge may be seen at Kensington. The Cornfield was again exhibited in the following year at the British Institution, together with The Glebe Farm, a popular work, but hardly successful in colour, and more spotty in general appearance than Constable's work had hitherto been. In the Academy of 1827 his chief picture was the large Marine Parade and Chain Pier, Brighton. The smaller works present a remarkable contrast. One was The Water Mill, Gillingham, which represents Constable's art in its soundest phase. It had probably been started some years before, since the building represented was burned in 1825. The second picture was a Hampstead Heath, probably the largest of those at South Kensington. In it the characteristics of Constable's latter manner are apparent—reckless freedom of brushwork, reckless use of the palette-knife to get brilliancy, and everywhere spots and scratches of pure colour. He had for many years employed such methods in sketching to catch the glitter and freshness which he admired in nature, and had often used them in parts of large pictures to get some particular effect, but The Hampstead Heath is one of the first pictures in which they actually predominate. His large Academy picture of 1828, an upright view of Dedham Vale, is interesting because it is identical in design with the Kensington sketch of 1802, and shows that little or no change had taken place in the painter's affection for his native Suffolk. It was admirably mezzotinted by Lucas on a large scale.
In 1829 Constable was made a full member of the Academy, and his chief picture of that year, the Hadleigh Castle, was the work that Chantrey is said to have warmed upon Varnishing Day with a glaze of asphaltum, much to the painter's alarm. The composition was twice engraved by Lucas, with whom Constable was now arranging for the series of mezzotints from his sketches, that he published in six parts under the title of "Various Subjects of Landscape Characteristic of English Scenery."
The publication was produced and issued at the painter's own expense. He not only took the greatest care in the selection of the subjects, but supervised the details of the engraving, and even went to the expense of engraving plates twice when dissatisfied with the first result. The outcome was the most magnificent series of landscape mezzotints ever produced. Even Turner's Liber Studiorum, with its amazing delicacy, variety, and accomplishment, does not move one so profoundly.[1] Conditions of space unfortunately forbid me to treat the plates in detail, but no one who wishes really to understand Constable should lose an opportunity of acquiring any of them that he happens to meet with. The series was from the first an absolute failure, and even now good proofs cost less than most modern etchings.
Stress has already been laid on the sound system of chiaroscuro which underlies all Constable's work. It is not therefore odd that his painting when translated into black and white should become not only more powerful but also more harmonious in effect. Constable in writing to Lucas tells him to "beware of his soot-bag." We ought to be thankful that Lucas used his own discretion in the matter, for owing to judicious simplication of the shadows, and the omission of small spots of light, the prints are broad and majestic in effect, even where the originals suggest mere "great-coat weather." A more critical age will doubtless do Lucas proper justice, and give him his true place among the masters of British Engraving. Constable's share in the credit for the "English Landscape Scenery" may be assessed by a simple experiment. Charles Turner made an excellent little mezzotint of Rembrandt's noble Mill, now in the possession of Lord Lansdowne. If this print be compared with The Weymouth Bay or The Old Sarum, it will be found that all three designs might almost have come from the same hand.
During the last seven years of his life Constable's painting was much interrupted by ill-health, depression, and by the anxieties attending the production of the "English Landscape Scenery." His style of sketching at the beginning of this period can be best understood by reference to several of the smaller works at Kensington. The small study for The Valley Farm deserves special attention for the beauty of its colour, and an air of dignity and repose unusual with the master during his last years. The Study of Tree Stems might almost come from the hand of Manet, so brilliant and natural is the blaze of the sunlight, so frank is the treatment of the cool shadows. The furious sepia studies of buildings and trees at Dedham and Bergholt may also be assigned to this period. The View of Hampstead Heath, which Constable exhibited at the Academy of 1830, is probably identical with the picture in the National Gallery. If it be compared with the Kensington picture of 1828, the continual increase in the use of the palette-knife will be apparent.
In 1831 Constable exhibited one of his masterpieces—Salisbury from the Meadows—so admirably mezzotinted on a large scale by Lucas that no description is necessary. In the following year he showed The Opening of Waterloo Bridge, for which the first sketch had been made more than ten years earlier. No picture seems to have caused Constable so much trouble, or to have been so often re-worked by him. Though it was an unpopular painting at the Academy, it is one of his most glowing and brilliant productions. Leslie says that all its brightness was destroyed by a picture-dealer, who covered the picture with coats of blacking and varnish to "tone" it. It would appear that this damage has since been repaired. Certainly, when the picture was last exhibited at Burlington House the impression it left was one of extraordinary splendour and power, in spite of the masses of loaded pigment in the sky. Constable's chief Academy picture of 1833 was Englefield House, Berkshire—Morning. A small water-colour of the subject, dated 1832, may be seen at Kensington. In the same room is a larger version of Old Sarum, one of the water-colours which were all that he could exhibit in 1834 owing to ill-health.
In his single Academy picture of 1835, the famous Valley Farm, Constable returns for the last time to the haunts of his youth, Willy Lott's cottage and the Flatford mill-stream by it. Attention has already been called to the finest of his many sketches of the composition. The majestic Cenotaph in the National Gallery, a view of the monument to Reynolds in the grounds at Coleorton, was Constable's principal Academy picture of 1836. The sketch for it, probably made during the painter's visit to Sir George Beaumont in 1823, is at Kensington. At Kensington, too, may be seen Constable's other Academy exhibit of 1836, a large water-colour of Stonehenge, seen under a tremendous effect of storm. In the same room hangs the brilliant sketch in oils of A Windmill near Brighton, the upright composition engraved by Lucas for the "English Landscape." The sketch and the engraving are placed side by side, so that it is easy to note how the painter, with the strong colour and loaded pigment characteristic of his last years, has aimed at an effect of brilliant sunlight and contrast, while the engraver's feeling for breadth has so softened the abrupt transitions that the scene has become grand and majestic. Before the opening of the Academy of 1837 Constable was dead, but his friends thought that his large picture of Arundel Mill was sufficiently finished to be shown in the Exhibition. The engraving of it by Lucas is not the most successful of his plates, being overcrowded with detail. The composition would have looked better had it been reproduced upon a larger scale.
Constable's comparatively early death was not in all respects unfortunate. He was at least spared the pain of seeing his work steadily deteriorate with advancing years. No deduction can be made from the sum-total of his achievement by balancing any feeble productions of old age against the excellence of maturity, as foolish people are apt to do in the case of men like Titian or Turner, who outlived the culmination of their genius. There is evidence, too, that Constable was not likely to have attained to greater perfection; indeed, in some respects, his work might have become in time less evenly excellent.
Some of the pictures exhibited after 1825, the Gillingham Mill, for instance, have the solidity and soundness of his full maturity, but in such cases it will be found that the pictures had been in hand for some time, and the date of exhibition represents only the date at which the finishing touches were added. The evidence of Constable's later sketches is more decisive. The studies made after the painter's fiftieth year are loose hasty memoranda, done anyhow. A few, it is true, are finished carefully, but they are the exceptions. As a rule, the passion for brightness, movement, and glitter becomes increasingly predominant, to the exclusion of graver artistic qualities, till at times the result is strikingly modern. The Kensington study of a tree stem surrounded by blazing sunlight has already been mentioned as an anticipation of Manet. In certain other sketches Constable went still further, and by a loose tremulous handling caught the effect of atmospheric vibration, which was rediscovered many years later by Monet and Pissarro. The logical result of such experiments is scientific imitation rather than Art, and, though a longer life might have enabled Constable to become even more modern than he is, it is doubtful whether he would have added to his fame as an artist.
The actual scope of his achievement is already wide enough. In early life his aim had been to find out how far the cool fresh colours of the skies and streams and fields and trees of his beloved Suffolk could be suggested within the then accepted limits of oil-painting. In middle age this aim was complicated by the desire of rendering effects of wind and storm, so that his work became the channel of deeper and stronger emotions than those aroused by rusticity in its everyday aspect. Doubtless the discouraging circumstances in which he developed had something to do with this preference for the more threatening and gloomy attitudes of nature. After his fiftieth year Constable became a devotee of light and air. He found, as the moderns have found, that this devotion was incompatible with the traditional handling of oil-paint—with smooth shapely brushwork passing by adroit transitions into a harmonious foundation of broken grey or brown, and afterwards mellowed by a warm glaze. To suggest the shimmer of wet grass and leaves in sunlight, or the intense brightness of the summer sky, he had to use paint fresh from the tube, loading parts of his canvas with spots and masses of pure pigment, so that no single atom of illumination might be lost. His method, in fact, was almost identical with that of our modern scientific painters, except in one important respect.
The essential difference is that Constable retained to the last his sound foundation in monochrome. Paintings like The Leaping Horse, The Valley Farm, and The Cenotaph, with all their splashing and spotting and scraping and loading, have thus a certain unity and dignity, which enables them to hang by the side of the paintings of the old masters, without looking garish or undecided. The very limitations of interest and insight which prevent Constable from ranking with Michelangelo or Titian or Rembrandt, have at least allowed him to achieve a success which at present remains unique. To blame him for not anticipating the feeling for a less conventional spacing, which has been stimulated during the last forty years by the discovery of the art of Japan, would be as unfair as to insist on the fact that his technique is less supremely certain or his taste less intensely sensitive than that of the greatest artists of the past. It is only necessary to compare his work with that of his predecessors or contemporaries, to realize how vast was the revolution that he initiated, more especially in the matter of colour, which he treated with a combination of frankness and temperance as yet unsurpassed. No man has hitherto combined so much of that beauty of aspect which we all admire in the Art of the past, with so large a measure of the wind and sunshine which have become the condition of the painting of our own day. Had Constable carried realism further, it might have been difficult to claim so much for him.
- ↑ A more extended notice of the series with several illustrations will be found in The Dome for May 1900.