Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, No. 359, September 1845

ENGLISH LANDSCAPE – CONSTABLE. 1

The appearance of the second edition of Leslie's Life of Constable invites attention to this truly English and original artist. We have read this volume with much interest. It is a graceful homage paid by a great living painter to the memory of one who is no more: a kindly, and, as we believe, an honest testimony to the moral and professional worth of one whose works stand out with a striking and distinct character in the English school of landscape-painting, and which, we are confident, will retain the place which they have slowly gained in public estimation, as long as a feeling of pictorial truth, in its more elevated sense, and as distinct from a mere literal imitation of details, shall continue to endure. Mr Leslie has accomplished his task with skill as well as good sense; for, keeping the labours of the editor entirely in the background, he has made Constable his own biographer – the work consisting almost entirely of extracts from his notes, journals, and correspondence, linked together by the slenderest thread of narrative. Story indeed, it may be said, there was none to tell; for, among the proverbially uneventful lives of artists, that of Constable was perhaps the least eventful. His birth – his adoption of painting as a profession (for he was originally destined pulverem collegisse in the drier duties of a miller) – his marriage, after a long attachment, on which parents had looked frowningly, but which the lovers, by patient endurance and confidence in each other, brought to a successful issue – his death, just when he had begun to feel that the truth and originality of his style were becoming better appreciated both abroad and at home; these, with the hopes, and fears, and anxieties for a rising family, which diversify the married life with alternate joys and sorrows, form, in truth, the only incidents in his history. The incidents of a painter's life, in fact, are the foundation of his character, the gradual development to his own mind of the principles of his art; and with Constable's thoughts and opinions, his habits of study, the growth of his style – if that term can be applied to the manner of one whose great anxiety it was to have no distinguishable style whatever – with his manly, frank, affectionate, and somewhat hasty disposition, with his strong self-reliance, and, as we may sometimes think, his overweening self-esteem – his strength of mind and his weaknesses – this volume makes us familiarly acquainted.

Constable was born in 1776, at East Bergholt in Sussex. His father was in comfortable circumstances, as may be gathered from the fact, that the artist (one of six children) ultimately inherited £4000 as his share of the succession. He was thus entirely exempted from the res angusta with which artists have so often to labour; although, with the characteristic improvidence of his profession, we still find that he had enough to do to make both ends meet. Born delicate, he grew up a strong and healthy boy, and was intended by his father, who had succeeded by purchase or inheritance to sundry wind and water mills, for a miller. Nay, for about a year, Constable actually performed that duty at one of his father's mills, and, it is said, faithfully and assiduously. Yet he contrived to turn even this episode in his life to some advantage. He treasured up a multitude of mental studies of clouds and skies, which, to the wind-miller, are always objects of peculiar interest, and acquired that familiarity with mills and their adjuncts which justified his brother's observation – "When I look at a mill painted by John, I see that it will go round, which is not always the case with those by other artists."

Even before his short trial of a miller's life, his love of drawing and painting had shown itself; but, receiving little countenance from his father, he had established a little sanctuary of his own in a workshop of a neighbouring plumber and glazier, John Dunthorne, a man of some intelligence, and himself an indefatigable artist on an humble scale. His mother, who seems from the first to have had something like a prophetic anticipation of his future eminence, procured him an introduction to Sir George Beaumont, who frequently visited his mother, the dowager Lady Beaumont, then residing at Dedham. The sight of a beautiful Claude – "The Hagar" – which Sir George generally carried with him when he travelled, and of some water-colour drawings by Girtin, which Sir George advised him to study as examples of truth and breadth, seem to have determined his wavering resolution to become a painter; and the combined influence of Claude and Girtin may, indeed, be traced more or less during the whole course of his practice. His father appeared at last to have given a reluctant consent, and the mill was abandoned for the painting-room, or rather for the study of nature in the open air, among the forest glades and by the still streams of Suffolk.

Suffolk, certainly, might not appear at first sight to be the place which one would choose for the education of a great painter. Mountains it has none; to the sublimity arising from lake or precipice, or the desolate expanse of moor and fell, it has no pretension; from the spots where Constable chiefly studied, even the prospect of old ocean was shut out; the country presented, as he himself describes it, only gentle declivities, luxuriant meadow flats, sprinkled with flocks and herds, quiet but clear streams, villages, farms, woodlands —

What influence scenery of a higher class might have had on Constable's mind, it is not easy to decide; as it was, the narrow circuit of a few miles round Bergholt, within which the materials of his pictures are chiefly found, became for him the epitome of English nature; and he associated the very ideal of beauty with those quiet nooks and scenes of tranquillity and amenity, where he had first exercised his pencil, and amidst which in after life he loved to linger.

And in truth, to a creative mind – for "it is the soul that sees," and renders back its vision – how much of beauty, picturesque variety, nay, under certain aspects and conditions of the atmosphere, how much of grandeur existed within this narrow circle! A friend of ours has maintained an ingenious thesis, that there is no such thing as a bad day in nature; though whether, after the aspect of the present summer, he retains his opinion, we think may be questioned. Constable certainly held a similar theory with regard to beauty in landscape. "Madam," said he to a lady who had denounced some object as ugly – "there is nothing ugly. I never saw an ugly thing in my life; for let the form of an object be what it may, light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful." This, indeed, was the talisman with which he worked; light and shade– the magic of chiaro-scuro applied to the simple elements of form which the rich pastures and woods of Suffolk afforded, and a power of exhibiting the varied influences and character of the skies, which, if it has been equalled by Turner, Calcott, and Fielding, has certainly never been surpassed by any British landscape-painter.

Let us glance at some of those pictures of tranquil English nature which Constable's landscapes afford; – not professing to follow the details of any particular picture, but embodying from recollection a few of their leading features, as exhibited under those lights or atmospheric effects, which he generally selected as in harmony with the sentiment of his scenes.

We are standing, for instance, on a broken foreground, across which the brier, the dog-rose, and the white bindweed have clasped themselves in fantastic tendrils. The white hemlock shoots up rankly by the hedge, and the tall bulrush and water-lily mark the course of the little stream which is sliding noiselessly past among the grass. It is early morning, as we see by the long oblique shadows. Yet industry is already at work. The wheel of that weather-stained and lichen-covered mill – call it Flatford if you will – is in motion, and the dripping water, glancing in the morning sun, descends from the cogs in a shower of diamonds. The stream that supplies the mill is crossed further down by a rustic bridge, as picturesque as it is inconvenient. Beyond, and towards the centre, a long wooded lane stretches out towards the horizon, close and overarching at top, but with the sunbeams straggling in between the trunks, and checkering the cool road with a network of light and shadow. About midway, a small spring, trickling from a bank, has been collected in a rude stone trough, for the refreshment of panting horse and wayworn traveller; beside which two market wains – the one on its way to the neighbouring town, the other returning from it – have stopped. The horses are watering; the waggoners gossiping over the news, or smoking together the calumet of peace; while a group of urchins, in whom the embryo ostler or future strapper are easily detected, are looking on with that interest in all that concerns horseflesh which distinguishes the rising members of an agricultural population. Beyond the lane are gentle hills, "rounded about by the low wavering sky" – some smoke indicating the market-town, and the spire of the village church leading the eye out of the picture, and crowning the cheerful serenity of the landscape.

The day advances, and the scene is changed. In the foreground we have a building-yard by the river. Boats and barges are seen in their rise, progress, decline, and fall; – some completed, some exhibiting merely their skeletons upon the stocks; some blistering in the sun beside the broken pier; some, which have seen better days, now entirely out of commission, and falling to pieces among the mud; – placed in all attitudes, and projecting broad and picturesque shadows along the ground. But these shadows are soft and transparent, not dark and cutting; for the sultry haze which rises steaming from all around, makes the summer sunshine veiled and dim. All nature is in a state of indolence. The lazy Stour sleeps beneath his fringes of elm and willow: a deep-laden barge comes leisurely along, as if anxious not to disturb his slumbers: the horse has plainly enough to do to make out his four miles an hour; and there is a dog on deck who seems nervous about hydrophobia. The man at the bow, depressing his head and elevating the lower part of his person to an American angle of elevation, has thrown his sturdy limbs across yon well-stuffed sacks of wheat, on their way to Flatford mill. Mercy on us! what can that fellow in the stern be about, pretending to steer? Just as we suspected – fast asleep, with his hand on the helm.

Another change – from the building-yard to the corn-field. The wind has risen as the day advanced, and driven off to the west the veil of vapour which had concealed the sun. The clouds ride high in heaven; and we see by their roll and motion that there is a refreshing air astir; – and there is need of it in this field of golden grain, framed, as it were, in the solid green of those groves, and over which the gray tower of Dedham church (which somehow or other finds its way into all these combinations of scenery) rises straight and motionless against the rounded forms of the ever-shifting sky. All here speaks of bustle and cheerful activity, peace and plenty. It is impossible to look at the scene, and think for a moment of the repeal of the corn-laws. Behind the stalwart band of reapers lie the heaps of sheaves that have already fallen beneath their sickle; the tall grain, swept by the wind, waves firm before them like a hostile rank yet unbroken; while the lord, as he is called in Suffolk, or leading man among the reapers and mowers, stands in advance of the rest, as if urging a final charge. In truth, there has been rather a lull among the workmen; for, breezy as the day is, still it is hot – the dinner-hour is nigh, and there is a visible anxiety evinced for the arrival of the commissariat. At last it is seen in the offing: the reapers, "sagacious of their quarry from afar," gather new vigour from the sight; and yonder tall fellow – an Irishman, we are positive even at this distance – seizing his sickle like one inspired, is actually working double tides.

But stay, we have got into wilder quarters, and here has been a storm. Ay, we thought the clouds, after such a sultry morning, were not rolling themselves into those ominous grey volumes for nothing. Broken ground lies before us in front, seemingly part of an old gravel-pit, down which winds a break-neck path, lost at yonder turning. Beneath us, a level flat, where the sullen verdure of the vegetation betrays the marshy, reedy, sterile character of the soil. Pools of water, here and there set amidst the swampy green, reflect the dark and watery clouds that are scudding above them. The lavender, the water-lily, the mallow, the fern, the fox-glove, luxuriate here; abundant food for botany, but not exactly in the place one would choose for botanizing – particularly, as is the case this moment, within an hour of sundown. Beyond the flat, the traces of a range of low hills, their outline at present lost in rain. Overhead, a spongy sky, darkening into a lurid gloom to the right; for there the laden thunder-clouds are about to discharge their freight; and right underneath, in the middle distance, an unhappy windmill, which has shortened sail during the preparatory blast, stands glimmering like a ghost through the gloom, obviously on the eve of the deluge. What may be the probable fate of the miller and his men in this conjuncture, humanity, of course, declines to contemplate; but, turning towards the left, sees the sun struggling through the opening eyelids of the clouds, the leaden hue of the sky on the right breaking off into a lustrous haze, and a rainbow growing into form and colour, which, as it spans the dripping landscape from east to west, gives token of a goodly day to-morrow.

These are but a few of the combinations which even this limited range of scenery evidently presented to the eye and fancy of a man like Constable; nor is it wonderful, after all, that to such materials, unpretending as they seem, an artist embued with a genuine love of nature should have succeeded in imparting a peculiar charm, and a never-ending freshness and variety. Amidst scenes of the sane tranquil cast did Hobbima and Waterlo find the subjects of those soothing pictures, the spell of which is acknowledged equally by the profound student of art and the simple admirer of nature. Scenes not materially different in their character did Ruysdael envelope in grandeur, depicting, as Constable expresses it in one of his lectures, "those solemn days peculiar to his country, and to ours, when, without storm, large rolling clouds scarcely permit a ray of sunlight to break the shades of the forest." And amidst the selfsame scenes – the same forest-lanes, and brooks, and woods, and waters – with the same happy accompaniments of rustic incidents, occupations, or amusements – did Constable's predecessor, Gainsborough, find his academy.

Very early in Constable's career, he adopted the principle which regulated through life the character of his painting. "There is room enough," he writes, after considering the Exhibition of 1802 – "There is 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 always will have, its day; but truth in all things only will last, and can only have just claims on posterity." Here, indeed, he felt, and justly, that there was an opening for him in the school of English landscape. Gainsborough, who had first communicated truth and life to the treatment of the genuine scenery of England, was no more. It is true, the grosser absurdities of the Smiths of Chichester, and the other compounders of landscapes secundum artem, with which we are familiar in the engravings of Woollet, in whose performances a kind of pictorial millennium appears to be realized; where the English cottage stands side by side with the Italian villa, and Norfolk bumpkins are seen making love to Arcadian shepherdesses knitting beneath the pillars of a Doric temple – these noxious grafts of a conventional taste upon the healthy stem of our native landscape-painting had disappeared. But still, the influence of this conventional taste in a great measure remained – shown in the established belief that subject made the picture, and necessitating, as was supposed, the exclusive adoption of certain established modes of composition, colouring, and treatment, from which the hardy experimentalist who should first attempt to deviate was sure, for a time at least, to encounter opposition; or, what was more probable, entire neglect.

"In art," says Constable, writing in 1829, "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 imitation 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 recognised and estimated; while the advances of the artist on a new path must necessarily be slow – for a few are able to judge of that which deviates from the usual course, or are qualified to appreciate original studies." In this passage is contained, both the principle of Constable's painting, and the history of its results: for, strange as it may seem, so little do general observers look at nature with an observing and pictorial eye – so much are their ideas of what it contains received at second-hand, by reflection from pictures – that the forms under which artists have combined to represent her (forms representing, it may be, a portion of the truth, but certainly not the whole truth) have, in the great majority of cases, superseded the stamp and authority of nature; and truth itself, where it did not steal in under a conventional garb, has been refused admittance by more than one committee of taste. "What a sad thing," Constable writes to Leslie, "that this lovely art is so wrested to its own destruction! Used only to blind our eyes, and to prevent us from seeing the sun shine, the fields bloom, the trees blossom, the foliage rustle; while old black rubbed-out and dirty canvasses take the place of God's own works!"

With his mind made up as to the course to be adopted, Constable betook himself to the study of nature on the spot. Careful drawing was his first object, as the substance to which the embodiment of colour and chiaroscuro was to be applied, and without which, though there might be effect, there could be no truth. His studies of trees and foreground are said to have been eminently beautiful. These, however, he loved to exhibit in their vernal, rather than their autumnal character. "I never did admire the autumnal tints, even in nature – so little of a painter am I in the eye of common connoisseurship. I love the exhilarating freshness of spring." Buildings he did not court, but rather avoided – though in later life he grappled successfully even with architectural detail, as in his pictures of Salisbury Cathedral;2 but, in general, he dealt with it sparingly. Shipping and coast-scenes he considered "more fit for execution than for sentiment." What he luxuriated in was the study of atmospheric effects, and the principles of light and shadow as applied to his sylvan and pastoral landscapes. "I hold the genuine pastoral feeling of landscapes," said he, writing in 1829 to his friend Archdeacon Fisher, "to be very rare, and difficult of attainment. It is by far the most lovely department of painting, as well as of poetry." "Painting," he says in another letter, "is with me but another word for feeling, and I associate my careless boyhood with all that lies on the banks of the Stour. These scenes made me a painter, and I am grateful." "Whatever may be thought of my art, it is my own; and I would rather possess a freehold, though but a cottage, than live in a palace belonging to another."

Thus feeling intensely the charm of nature – and confident that by the vivid representation of pastoral English landscape, he could enable it to exercise upon other minds something of the same spell which it produced on his own – his whole efforts, as he says himself, were directed to forget pictures, and to catch if possible the precise aspect which the scenery which he endeavours to portray presented at the moment of study. And here particularly it is, that the genius of Constable is visible. A man of less reach of mind, beginning, as he did, with this minute attention to the vocabulary of detail, would probably have ended there. We should have had a set of pictures perfectly painted in parts, but forming no consistent whole. All general effect would have been sacrificed to the impression to be produced by particulars. The very love of nature often leads to this error – as in the once-popular Glover, and many others. But no one had a fuller sense than Constable, that by this means pictures never can be created; that literal imitation of the details of nature is a delusion; because not only is the medium we use entirely inadequate, but paint as we may, with the most microscopic minuteness of detail, the thousand little touches and reflexes of light and shade, which soften and harmonize all things in nature, are essentially evanescent, and incapable of being transferred to canvass. He felt that a certain substitute for nature, awakening a corresponding impression upon the mind, was all that he could be afforded by painting – that the spirit and not the letter of her handwriting was to be imitated. The object of painting, as he himself expressed it, "was to realize, but not to feign: to remind, but not to deceive."

Hence, while he perfectly succeeded in catching the spirit of the spot – so much so, that Mr Leslie, visiting the scenes of his pictures for the first time after his death, declares, "that he was absolutely startled by the resemblance" – he yet exercised over the whole that creative, at least compounding art, which arrayed the objects in the forms most harmonious to the eye, and grouped the details into a whole, telling in the most effective manner the story, or conveying the impression it was intended to create. The composition of a picture, he used to say, "was like a sum in arithmetic – take away, or add the smallest item, and the whole was certain to be wrong."

As a consequence, we think, of this conviction, that nature is not to be literally imitated in her colours or forms, but that some compromise is to be found, by which, though on a lower key, a similar impression is to be made on the eye, and through that on the mind, is the general abstinence from positive colour, which distinguishes Constable's paintings. It was not that he adopted the conventional orange and brown of the continental school, or shrank from endeavouring to carry the full impression of the dewy verdure of English landscape. For these subterfuges in art he had an abundant contempt. "Don't you find it very difficult to determine," said Sir George Beaumont, (who, with all his fine feelings of art, certainly looked at nature through a Claude Lorraine medium,) "where to place your brown tree?" "Not in the least," was Constable's answer, "for I never put such a thing into a picture." On another occasion, when Sir George was recommending the colour of an old Cremona fiddle as a good prevailing tone for every thing, Constable answered the observation by depositing an old Cremona on the green lawn in front of the house at Cole-Orton. But what we mean is this – that to produce the effect which green or red produces in nature, it does not follow that green or red are to be used in art, and that the impression of these colours will often be better brought out by tints in which but a very small portion of either is to be found.

Mr Leslie has remarked this peculiarity in several of Constable's pictures. Speaking of Constable's Boat-building, he observes – "In the midst of a meadow at Flatford, a barge is seen on the stocks, while, just beyond it, the river Stour glitters in the still sunshine of a hot summer's day. This picture 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 gray and green in it; but such is its atmospheric truth, that the tremulous vibration of the heated air near the ground seems visible." Again, with regard to a small view from Hampstead heath. "The sky is of the blue of an English summer day, with large but not threatening clouds of a silvery whiteness. The distance is of a deep blue, and the near trees and grass of the freshest green; for Constable could never consent to patch up the verdure of nature to obtain warmth. These tints are balanced by a very little warm colour on a road and gravel-pit in the foreground, a single house in the middle distance, and the scarlet jacket of a labourer. Yet I know no picture in which the mid-day heat of summer is so admirably expressed; and were not the eye refreshed by the shade thrown over a great part of the foreground by some young trees that border the road, and the cool blue of water near it, one would wish in looking at it for a parasol, as Fuseli wished for an umbrella when standing before one of Constable's showers."