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
10
