John Constable Read online

  East Bergholt lay in the extremely fertile countryside of southern Suffolk, on sandy soil rather than the more irksome clay, and perched on the northern rim of the shallow Stour valley. This was just upstream from where the placid river broadened out into a tidal estuary – a few miles east were the seaport of Harwich and the North Sea. The Stour, as the Reverend Grimwood would have told his pupils, had been the ancient boundary between the Angles and the Saxons. East Bergholt was a diffuse village, with a skein of houses threaded along a curving main street. Constables had been living in the Stour valley for generations and Golding Constable didn’t mind calling it home; he claimed he found it hard to breathe when close to the city, in fact as soon as he reached Ilford in Essex. Moreover, East Bergholt, like most Suffolk villages, had its own energies and preoccupations in farming and trades linked to it. In the past cloth-making had made for local prosperity. One effect of that could be seen in the fine early-Tudor church, squatting where the street took a right-angle bend; while the rapid winding-down of cloth fortunes was evident in the fact that the church had never been given an upper tower or spire.

  Dedham Grammar School was John Constable’s third school and his favourite so far. In 1783, aged seven, he had been plucked from the family bosom and sent as a weekly boarder fifteen miles away, to Aldham, just west of Colchester. There, at Pound House, in Ford Street, which ran down to the River Colne, he had gone to Mr Stilleman King’s establishment; this taught the three Rs to children aged eight or nine.1 From there, his father having ambitions to make him a clergyman or his successor in the Constable business, he was removed to Lavenham, about twelve miles from East Bergholt. Lavenham School was meant to be run by Mr Blower, a man unfortunately headlong in love, and there young Constable came up against the brutal cane of an usher who was the stand-in pedagogue for the distracted headmaster. Ever after Constable thought of Lavenham School as a prison. (The experience was to make him reluctant to impose a formal education on his own children.) But an appeal to his father and mother was successful – the Constables were by and large doting parents – and Constable was transported to close-at-hand Dedham as a day boy. Here, for the next five years, his failure to shine academically was tolerated. Dr Thomas Grimwood, forty-six in 1786, managed to instil in him some knowledge of the Bible and the classics, and some Latin, Greek and French. Indeed, Constable’s Latin later sufficed for keeping up with his friend John Fisher, a bishop’s nephew, when they read Horace together.2

  Dr Grimwood possibly remained indulgent because Constable showed a talent for penmanship and calligraphy, skills most teachers favour.fn1 Constable seemed to think in pictures, before he ever drew or painted, and Dr Grimwood, good at his job, recognised that his dreamy pupil might have other than conventional talents. ‘Honest John,’ as he called the boy, might indeed be too much of a ‘genious’ to become a merchant. When Constable, abstracted in the classroom, didn’t realise he had just been asked a question, Dr Grimwood exclaimed with a forgiving smile, ‘Oh, I see you are in your painting room.’3

  What he remembered of his childhood came occasionally into view, when afterwards he recalled what he had seen, almost as if framed, from windows of the family house. The prospect, for example, across the kitchen garden or flower garden to outbuildings and then fields. The porch and the sundial over the entrance to the church, the building that was their immediate neighbour to the south-east, or the grassy strip of common land across the way, on which fairs were held in summer. The windmill belonging to his father that stood on the near horizon, at the edge of East Bergholt Common, a white-painted wooden postmill with dark sails, a village landmark that he looked at every morning to see what it told him about the weather, where it was coming from and how hard it was blowing. Landmarks and bench-marks. Various lanes radiated from the village centre out to the hamlets of Gaston End, Burnt Oak, Baker’s End, Pittis End and Flatford. About a thousand people lived in this community, with a dense stratum of farm workers and their families at the base and a few notables at the top, including the squire Peter Godfrey, who lived across the street at Old Hall, and the rector whose fine house and long driveway was visible through the trees beyond the church, the rectory grounds forming the territory along the eastern border of the Constable estate. Here was a known order of things. Here was a security that for a long time didn’t manifest its claustrophobic aspects. Everyone knew young John Constable, and he knew everyone: the family servants, his father’s workers, village people, local gentry. The tilling of land and the harvesting of crops, the shipping of grain out and coal in, created a structure to life: what happened when. You knew what seasons betokened particular events and how you’d be expected to handle them, what clothes to wear, what food to eat.

  The house seemed to him a mansion. It had not only Georgian symmetry but size enough to give a boy lots of scope. As other siblings came on the scene – another sister, Mary, in 1781, and a younger brother, Abram, two years later – and as his two older sisters either cosseted him or kept telling him what to do, he found its space useful; there were rooms to hide in, to read or draw in; there were the gardens and nearby fields for further refuges. John grew up with an unquestioning sense of where he stood in the local order of things: near the top. This confidence was no doubt aided by the fact that he was the heir apparent: Golding, though older, had his handicaps; Ann and Martha were girls. (Ann remained boyish-looking; she never married but was devoted to her horses and dogs. Mary, also a spinster, seemed to get increasingly scatterbrained with the years.) However, their father’s fortunes fluctuated with trade, with the price of grain and coal, with peace or war, and Golding Constable let his children know it, even though the family was cushioned against the worst slumps and downturns. It wouldn’t do them any harm to prepare for occasional frugality.

  East Bergholt House, c.1810

  As well as the windmill across the common, his father owned two watermills, one at Dedham and the other at Flatford, inherited from Uncle Abram, the corn-factor in London. ‘Corn’ was not American maize but any sort of grain, particularly wheat used for flour. There were also two yards and a wharf at Mistley, on the Stour estuary, where the Constable coastal vessels Telegraph and Balloon – modern names for traditional sailing craft – loaded grain for London and brought back bricks and manure. Several canal barges carried these goods further inland, to and from Dedham and Sudbury. Although ‘trade’ underpinned his family’s existence, and the Constables wouldn’t have considered themselves gentry, they were well connected. Mrs Constable knew the widowed Lady Beaumont, now remarried to Mr John Gates and living in an elegant house in Dedham High Street.4 The Cobbold brewing family in Ipswich were friends. Mrs Constable’s brother David Pike Watts, a wine merchant and brewery owner in London, eventually had a fortune of £300,000. Several military and naval men were relations. John’s sister Martha, nicknamed Patty, his only sibling ever to marry, became Mrs Nathaniel Whalley and provided another substantial family foothold in the City of London – the Whalleys were cheesemongers in Aldgate. The Constables had an eminent neighbour in Dr Durand Rhudde, who became rector of East Bergholt in 1782, when John was six. Dr Rhudde (pronounced Rudd) was a chaplain to George III. His daughter Maria Elizabeth married Charles Bicknell, lawyer to the Admiralty, and his sister had married a wealthy Suffolk landowner, William Bogdani. This relationship would eventually enhance Dr Rhudde’s fortunes.5

  For the time being, young John Constable was at the centre of his own world. Dr Grimwood, despite his concerns with parsing and declensions, was no fierce taskmaster; the boy, he thought, would get on quietly one way or another. John’s mother hoped he would grow up pious and well mannered, but she herself was not just pious but practical and shrewd. John’s father continued to assume that, with John’s brother Golding being what he was, John would come into the business. No one objected if John’s training for doing the accounts, for the intricacies of buying grain or selling coal, appeared to include helping out with barges at Flatford lock, sitting with a fish
ing pole beside the Stour backwater below Fen Bridge, and walking to the windmill on a day of scudding clouds to watch the sails swish by, while the grinding stones within sounded a rough susurrus. The Stour countryside was in good heart. Something to be proud of even if the world beyond, from what the Ipswich papers said about it, was in a parlous state, with the French murdering their monarch and the English fleet the only bulwark to prevent Jacobin hordes from swarming on to our shores. Even so, it would be good if the mate of the Telegraph could escape his impressment and go back to serving the Constables rather than the Crown.

  What John Constable took in from his father, and didn’t at first react against with any passionate contrariness, was a sense of the necessities in their lives: people needed food and fuel, and the family themselves got their livelihoods from supplying this need. The land, one way or another, had seasonal rhythms that had to be honoured, and the river its varying levels and tides that must be served. Much of this was unspoken. And equally, when he was sixteen, there was scarcely a decision made: he started work alongside the clerks in his father’s office and the workmen at the mills. Like most youths he wanted to leave his mark and used his penknife to carve the outline of a windmill on a beam of their postmill; nearby with the same implement he added an inscription, ‘John Constable, 1792’. He knew about mills inside and out, and brother Abram later boasted, ‘When I look at a windmill painted by John, I see that it will go round’ – for Abram, this wasn’t apparently the case with windmills drawn by other artists. John’s early reading interests and rudimentary drawing skills were evident in a book, A Juvenile Introduction to History, in whose margins he made clumsy illustrations: two windmills behind the brow of a hill, on one page, and on another, a sketch for a bloody tale called ‘Fraternal Affection’. In this a ship had been wrecked and lots were drawn for places in the ship’s small boat. One boy gave up his place to his older brother, but then, in the icy water, he changed his mind and tried to clamber on board. His crewmates chopped off his hands to prevent him swamping the boat, but the lad continued to tread water so bravely that his mates relented and saved him – they made land next day. The drawing shows the desperate boy’s handless stumps. It provides no evidence of artistic talent but possibly suggests fraternal feeling for brother Golding.6

  Constable, though hardly demonstrating it, was all the while storing up data. What the sky looked like on a spring day; the look of East Bergholt fields being lashed by rain and hail; high skies with masses of cloud above and bits of cloud below that were moving faster – these, he later noted, were called ‘messengers’ by millers and sailors, and foretold bad weather. A millworker kept his eyes on the shapes of clouds – thunderheads, cauliflower clouds, anvil shapes – so that he was ready to get the sails right for what was coming, and if necessary put the brakes on. Saw-blades needed to be kept sharp; gears and blocks had to be greased; blocks and tackle were on hand to be hooked into the right eye-bolt for hauling the mill round into the prevailing wind. Working at the Pitt’s Farm windmill, named after a nearby homestead, and at the two watermills could have given the tall good-looking boy the opportunity to live up to the fertility lore attached to his occupation, or at least appreciate the humour of it. In several European languages to ‘mill’ was also to copulate. In ancient Greek myllein meant to grind, to press the lips together, or, figuratively, to have sex. ‘Even today in vernacular German,’ writes Anita Albus, ‘to “mill” is equivalent to “engaging in sexual intercourse”.’ Constable undoubtedly made an impression on the local girls, but the story handed on by an old-timer from Dedham that, claiming a God-given droit de seigneur, Constable got one impressionable though protesting lass into trouble and sired a reminder of his insistence, is unsupported by anything other than gossip and our knowledge of what lads normally get up to, if they can.7

  In late adolesence Constable had a frequent companion: John Dunthorne. Constable was eighteen in 1794 and Dunthorne twenty-four, the six years’ seniority making him a useful adviser on several counts. Dunthorne lived in a cottage close by in The Street, facing the junction with Cemetery Lane, across from the Red Lion Inn, and just north of the Constables’ entrance gate. Dunthorne had married Hannah Bird the year before. Ann Constable later claimed that Hannah took in Dunthorne ‘from an advertizement, without a change of raiment, or a shilling in his pocket’, and although the marriage had its ups and downs the couple had four children (Ann, James, John and Hannah). Dunthorne worked as a jack of all trades, as plumber, house painter, signboard artist, glazier, handyman and, at one period, village constable. For Constable, Dunthorne’s chief fascination was his desire to be a painter, not just as a maker of signs but pictures: no one else in the Constable family had such an interest. Moreover, Dunthorne struck his East Bergholt fellow residents as a maverick. The rector regarded him as a dangerous atheist. For Constable, this may have added to Dunthorne’s appeal.8

  They were soon companions on the road to art, going off on local painting expeditions together. Golding Constable was at first amused by his son’s harmless hobby and said, when he saw the pair arrive back in the village carrying their sketching gear, ‘Here comes Don Quixote with his Man Friday!’ (He may just as easily have said, ‘Here comes Robinson Crusoe with his friend Sancho Panza.’) With Dunthorne, Constable learned diligence, observation and technique. The engraver David Lucas later wrote (in a note made in his copy of Leslie’s Life), ‘Both were methodical in their practice, taking with them into the fields their easels and painted only for a certain time each day. When the shadows from objects had changed their position the sketching was postponed untill the same hour, the following day.’ Constable afterwards recalled the importance of East Bergholt and its scenery in what he became: ‘I associate my “careless boyhood” to all that lies on the banks of the Stour. They made me a painter.’ In this John Dunthorne was a vital prop, providing the physical help and cheerful encouragement an adolescent boy might need. Dunthorne, although untrained himself, was also a practical instructor, demonstrating what to do with pigments and linseed oil, brushes and canvas. Together they solved problems of focus and composition, colour and contrast.9

  Nothing of Constable’s work from those apprentice days shows any great talent. He must have been in at least two minds about what he was going to do, but he didn’t seem completely repelled by the destiny of grain merchant that hung over him. His father worked hard, put his shrewd mind to problems of shipping and milling, and was a thoughtful parent. His son was impressed by Golding Constable’s consideration for his workers. On one occasion a bargee had refused a move from one Constable-owned cottage to another, telling his employer, ‘If I remove from this place I shall never be able to shave again.’ How so? asked Mr Constable. The bargee replied that he sharpened his razor every Sunday on the top step of the stairs and couldn’t do without it. Well, said Mr C, in that case ‘my carpenter will take up the step for you to carry with you, and the stairs too if you want them.’ John’s mother managed the large household, organised the domestic brewing and dairy work, was well informed about village affairs and kept in touch with her London relatives. She remembered birthdays and sent useful gifts. But she regarded John Dunthorne as by no means a suitable companion for her son. Moreover, she wished young John could be more sociable and spend time at home with his family rather than stay out sketching in the fields till nightfall.10

  Even so, Ann Constable’s contacts in Dedham and the next village, Langham, helped set her son on a path that bypassed the grain and coal business. Perhaps there was an element of maternal cleverness here, if not a little social climbing. She may have thought that if John were going to be mixed up with painting and painters, why not ensure that he got to know a grandee or two, not just an artisan? In 1795 Mrs Constable arranged for John to call on the twice-widowed dowager Lady Beaumont in Dedham High Street when Lady Beaumont’s son Sir George, whom Mrs Constable had known as a boy, was staying there. The baronet was now a very wealthy man, his riches founded on coal mines,
with a house in Grosvenor Square, London, and a country estate first in Dunmow, Essex, and then Coleorton, Leicestershire. More crucially, Sir George was a distinguished collector of paintings, a dedicated amateur artist and a connoisseur of high taste; he had done the Grand Tour and had objets and stories to show for it; he had known such artistic luminaries as Reynolds, Gainsborough and Wilson; and Alexander Cozens himself had taught him art at Eton.11

  In Dedham, Sir George agreed to let Constable, nineteen that summer, show him some pen-and-ink copies the young man had made of engravings (by Dorigny) of some Raphael cartoons. In turn, Sir George showed Constable watercolours he owned by Thomas Girtin, a rising star in London – ‘examples of great breadth and truth’, that Beaumont advised Constable to study. He also displayed a small painting which he carried everywhere in a travelling case. It was an Annunciation scene painted in 1646 by Claude Lorrain. In an Italianate landscape – bright water, bright sky – a young woman sat beneath some overarching trees with an angel beside her making meaningful gestures. This was Hagar, whose story is recounted in Genesis: after Abraham got her pregnant, she quarrelled with Abraham’s wife Sarah and then ran off into the wilderness. There she met the angel by a spring. The angel told Hagar her child would be a boy named Ishmael, who would lead a great tribe. Meanwhile, the angel said, Hagar should return home to live with Sarah. The angel pointed the way to a small town on a hilltop.