Constable Part 1

Constable.

by C. Lewis Hind.

CHAPTER I

THE YEAR 1824

John Constable was forty-eight years of age in 1824, a memorable year in the history of landscape painting. A date to be remembered is 1824, for in that year Constable's "Hay Wain" was hung in the French Salon.

That picture, which is now in the National Gallery, marked an epoch in landscape art.

Reams have been written about the influence of "The Hay Wain" upon French art, by critics who are all for Constable, by critics who are complimentary but temperate; and by critics who are lukewarm and almost resentful of the place claimed for Constable as protagonist of nineteenth century landscape art. A guerilla critical warfare has also raged around the influence of Turner. Constable and Turner! Most modern landscape painters have, at one time or another, learnt from these two great pioneers. Turner is more potent to-day, but his influence took longer to a.s.sert itself. It was not until 1870 that Monet visited London to be dazzled by the range and splendour of Turner at the National Gallery. Forty-six years had pa.s.sed since "The Hay Wain" was exhibited at the Salon. In that half-century the Barbizon School, those great men of 1830, Corot, Rousseau, Millet, Daubigny, Troyon, Diaz, and the rest had come to fruition. Constable has been claimed as their parent. Th.o.r.e, the French critic, who wrote under the name of G. W. Burger, affirms that Constable was the _point de depart_ of the Barbizon School; but Albert Wolff, another eminent French critic, was not of that opinion. Th.o.r.e, writing in 1863, also said that although Constable had stimulated in France a school of painting unrivalled in the modern world, he had had no influence in his own country, a far too sweeping statement.

PLATE II.--THE HAY WAIN. National Gallery.

Painted in 1821, exhibited in the French Salon in 1824, "The Hay Wain,"

with two other smaller works, which had been purchased from Constable by a French connoisseur, aroused extraordinary interest in Paris, and had a potent influence on French landscape art. So impressed was Delacroix with the naturalness, the freshness, and the brightness of Constable's pictures at the 1824 Salon, that he completely repainted his "Ma.s.sacre of Scio" in the four days that intervened before the opening of the exhibition.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE II.--THE HAY WAIN.]

The truth about Constable's influence on French art would seem to be midway between the opinions of Th.o.r.e and Wolff. That Constable's exhibits at the Salon of 1824, which included two smaller landscapes besides "The Hay Wain," did arouse extraordinary interest, and did have a potent influence on French landscape art, there is no shadow of doubt. So impressed was Delacroix with the naturalness, the freshness, and the brightness of Constable's pictures at the 1824 Salon, that, after studying them, he completely repainted his "Ma.s.sacre of Scio" in the four days that intervened before the opening of the exhibition; and the following year Delacroix visited London eager to see more of Constable's work. There is also the testimony of William Brockedon, who, on his return from the Salon, wrote thus to the painter of "The Hay Wain." The text of the letter is printed in C. R. Leslie's Memoirs of the _Life of Constable_, a mine of information in which all writers on John Constable, whom de Goncourt called "_le grand, le grandissime maitre_," must delve.

"My dear Constable," wrote William Brockedon, "You will find in the enclosed some remarks upon your pictures at Paris. I returned last night and brought this with me. The French have been forcibly struck by them, and they have created a division in the school of the landscape painters of France. You are accused of carelessness by those who acknowledge the truth of your effect; and the freshness of your pictures has taught them that though your means may not be essential, your end must be to produce an imitation of Nature, and the next Exhibition in Paris will teem with your imitators, or the school of Nature versus the school of Birmingham. I saw one man draw another to your pictures with this expression--'Look at these landscapes by an Englishman; the ground appears to be covered with dew.'"

Note these pa.s.sages: _They have created a division in the school of the landscape painters of France--Paris will teem with your imitators--The ground appears to be covered with dew._

Constable received the gratifying news very quietly. Writing to Fisher from Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square, on 17th December 1824, he remarked--"My Paris affairs go on very well. Though the Director, the Count Forbin, gave my pictures very respectable situations in the Louvre in the first instance, yet on being exhibited a few weeks, they advanced in reputation, and were removed from their original situations to a post of honour, two prime places in the princ.i.p.al room. I am much indebted to the artists for their alarum in my favour; but I must do justice to the Count, who is no artist I believe, and thought that as the colours are rough they should be seen at a distance. They found the mistake, and now acknowledge the richness of texture, and attention to the surface of things. They are struck with their vivacity and freshness, things unknown to their own pictures. The truth is, they study (and they are very laborious students) pictures only, and as Northcote says, 'They know as little of Nature as a hackney-coach horse does of a pasture' ... However, it is certain they have made a stir, and set the students in landscape to thinking."

Note the pa.s.sages: _They are struck with their vivacity and freshness--The truth is they study pictures only._

I have quoted these letters at length, because they are first-hand authorities, and because they state, with simple directness, the effect of Constable's pictures at the Salon of 1824. The two smaller works that accompanied "The Hay Wain" we may disregard for the moment, and ask what is there in "The Hay Wain" that it should have so startled the French painting world, and that it should have marked an epoch in the history of landscape art. Stand before "The Hay Wain" in the National Gallery and ask yourself that question. If you are honest, you will admit, perhaps only to yourself, that "The Hay Wain" looks a little old-fas.h.i.+oned. And you will also admit that the full-sized sketch for "The Hay Wain," which you have surely noticed hanging in the Constable room at the Victoria and Albert Museum, pleases you better on account of its greater brilliance, vigour, and impulse. The finished picture, though very powerful, seems a little stolid, a little laboured, as if the painter had left nothing to "happy accident" but had worked with John Bull conscientiousness over every inch of the canvas. You have in the last decade or two seen so many landscapes--pearly, atmospheric, s.p.a.cious, vivid and vibrating with suns.h.i.+ne, that this "Hay Wain" by honest John, this English pastoral with the great sky, the s.h.i.+mmering water, and the leaves carefully accented with colour to represent the flickers of light, does not astonish you. Perhaps you pa.s.s it by without a pause, without even a cursory examination. But remember this is 1909, and "The Hay Wain" made its sensation in 1824. In those eighty-five years landscape painting has progressed at a faster rate than in all the preceding centuries. In 1824 "The Hay Wain" was a fresh vision, very new and arresting. Why? Simply because Constable returned to Nature and painted Nature. Again and again has this happened in the history of art from the time of Giotto onwards. The little men falter on, copying one another, "studying pictures only," in Constable's phrase; the public accepts their wooden performances as true art; then the great man arises, often a very simple, straight-thinking, modest man like this John Constable, and the great man does nothing more miraculous than just to use his own eyes; he refuses to be dictated to by others as to what he should see and do, and lo! the world looks at what he has done, and either rejects him altogether (for a time), or says, "Here is a genius. Let us make much of him."

One thing is certain. It was not by taking thought, by planning or scheming, that John Constable made that sensation at the Salon of 1824.

It was born in him to be what he became--a painter of Nature. How easy and simple it seems. Everybody paints Nature to-day; but in the early years of last century one had to be a great original to break away from tradition and from academic formulae, and to paint--just Nature.

The awakening came to John Constable in 1802, when he was twenty-six years of age. In a letter to his friend Dunthorne, Constable wrote from London:

"For the last two years I have been running after pictures and seeking the truth at second hand ... 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 Exhibitions worth looking up to. _There is room for a natural painter_."

A natural painter he became--the painter of England, of simple rural scenes. At forty-seven years of age he lamented that he had never visited Italy, but the mood pa.s.sed as quickly as it came, and he cries: "No, but I was born to paint a happier land, my own dear old England."

And from his own dear old England he banished the brown tree. But the droll story of the Brown Tree deserves a new chapter.

CHAPTER II

THE BROWN TREE

"A constant communion with pictures, the tints of which are subdued by time, no doubt tends to unfit the eye for the enjoyment of freshness."

So wrote the wise Leslie in a chapter narrating certain pa.s.sages of art talk between Constable and Sir George Beaumont, when the painter was visiting the amiable baronet at Cole-Orton. The modern world is a little amused by Sir George Beaumont--collector, connoisseur, and painter--who, in his own ripe person, precisely and accurately exemplified Constable's criticism of certain French artists. "They study (and they are very laborious students) pictures only." Sir George loved art, as he understood the term, and it was not his fault that he could not see eye to eye with the young vision of Constable.

Quite content and happy was Sir George; he did not wish to change.

Loved art? He had a pa.s.sion for art. Did he not always carry with him upon his journeys Claude's picture of "Hagar"? In 1826 he presented "Hagar," which is now catalogued under the t.i.tle of "Landscape with Figures," to the nation; but he felt so disconsolate without his adored picture that he begged to have it returned to him for his life-time.

That was done, and on Sir George's death in 1828 his widow restored "Hagar" to the National Gallery. Study "Hagar," and you have the measure of the art predilections of Sir George Beaumont, collector, connoisseur, painter, patron, and friend of John Constable, and author of the famous question, "Do you find it very difficult to determine where to place your brown tree?"

Constable's answer is recorded. "Not in the least, for I never put such a thing into a picture."

Sir George did. Observing the brown tree sprawling in the formal and academic pictures he prized and copied, he reproduced it laboriously in his own works. Apparently it never occurred to him that those brown trees may once have been green.

"Sir George," says Leslie, "seemed to consider the autumnal tints necessary, at least to some part of a landscape." And Leslie is the authority for two oft-told stories about Gaspar Poussin and about the Cremona fiddle.

PLATE III.--THE CORNFIELD, OR COUNTRY LANE.

National Gallery.

Painted in 1826, and presented to the National Gallery in 1837 by an a.s.sociation of gentlemen, who purchased it of the painter's executors.

A typical work. John Constable was pleased with his Cornfield.

Writing of it to Archdeacon Fisher, he said--"It is not neglected in any part; the trees are more than usually studied, well defined as well as the stems; they are shaken by a pleasant and healthful breeze at noon."

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE III.--THE CORNFIELD, OR COUNTRY LANE.]

Sir George having placed a small landscape by Gaspar Poussin on his easel, close to a picture he was painting, said, "Now, if I can match these tints I am sure to be right."

"But suppose," replied Constable, "Gaspar could rise from his grave, do you think he would know his own picture in its present state? or if he did, should we not find it difficult to persuade him that somebody had not smeared tar or cart grease over its surface, and then wiped it imperfectly off?"

The fiddle story can be told in fewer words. Sir George having recommended the colour of an old Cremona fiddle for the prevailing tone of everything in Nature, Constable answered by laying an old fiddle on the green lawn before the house.

Sir George Beaumont was one of the last of the servile disciples of Claude Lorraine and the Poussins, who conjured their followers into believing that a landscape must be composed in the grand or "cla.s.sical"

manner, and must conform to certain academic rules. Claude's drawings, preserved in the British Museum, proclaim that he could be as frank, delightful, and impulsive as Constable in his sketches; but when Claude constructed a landscape of ruined temples and fatuous biblical or legendary figures, the inspiration of his drawing usually evaporated.

Claude's genius remained, and there are pictures by him, notably "The Enchanted Castle," that in their particular manner have never been surpa.s.sed; but alas! it was not the genius that Sir George Beaumont imitated, but Claude's mannerisms and limitations.

The stay-at-home Dutchmen who flooded the seventeenth century with their simple, homely, and often beautiful landscapes had no attraction for grandiose Sir George and his kin. The genius of Watteau which flashed into the eighteenth century, the commanding performances of Richard Wilson and Gainsborough in landscape, had no influence upon the pract.i.tioners of the grand manner. And in truth those pioneers suffered for their temerity. Wilson, who never quite cast off the cla.s.sical mantle, accepted with grat.i.tude, at the height of his fame, the post of librarian to the Royal Academy. Gainsborough would have starved had he been obliged to depend upon landscape painting for a living, and Constable would have been in financial straits had he been obliged to depend for the support of his family entirely upon the sale of his pictures.

Wilson died in 1782, Gainsborough in 1788, and J. R. Cozens, whom Constable described as "the greatest genius who ever touched landscape," in 1799; but the careers of these men cannot be said to have influenced their landscape contemporaries. While Wilson, Gainsborough, and Cozens were still alive, certain boys were growing up in England, who were destined to make the nineteenth century splendid with their landscape performances. What a galaxy of names! Old Crome and James Ward were born in 1769; Turner and Girtin in 1775; Constable in 1776. Cotman saw the light in 1782, the year of Wilson's death; David c.o.x in 1783; Peter de Wint in 1784, and the short and brilliant life of Bonington began in 1801. But landscape painting was still, and was to remain for long, the Cinderella of the arts. In 1829 Cotman wrote a letter beginning, "My eldest son is following the same miserable profession."

Constable's British contemporaries being men of genius of various degrees, men of individual vision, it is quite natural that his influence upon them should have been almost negligible. Turner, Old Crome, and Bonington owed nothing to Constable; but in France it was different. In the early years of the nineteenth century when Englishmen were producing magnificent work which was to bring them such great posthumous fame and such small rewards during their lifetime, landscape painting in France was still slumbering in cla.s.sical swathing-bands. As if frightened out of originality by the horrors of the French Revolution of 1789, the landscape painters of France for thirty years and more remained steeped in the apathy of cla.s.sicism.

David (1748-1825) dominated the French art world, and no mere landscape painter was able to dispel the heavy tradition that David imposed in historical painting. True there were protestors, original men (there always are), but they were powerless to stem the turgid stream. There was Paul Huet and there was Georges Michel, happy no doubt in their work, but unfortunate in living before their time. Michel, neglected, misunderstood, was excluded from the Salon exhibitions after 1814, on account of his revolutionary tendencies. We note signs of the brown tree obsession in Michel's s.p.a.cious and simple landscapes, but he painted the environs of Paris, and did not give a thought to theatrical renderings of Plutarch, Theocritus, Ovid, or Virgil.