Constable in Love

Love, Landscape, Money and the
Making of a Great Painter

MARTIN GAYFORD

FIG TREE
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS

Contents

List of Illustrations

CONSTABLE IN LOVE

Married Life

Afterword and Note on Sources

Selected Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Index

By the same author

The Yellow House Van

Gogh, Gauguin and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles

The Penguin Book of Art Writing

(with Karen Wright, eds.)

To Cecily and Tom

List of Illustrations

All works are by John Constable unless otherwise stated.

p. 6 Ramsay Richard Reinagle: John Constable (1799), oil on canvas – National Portrait Gallery, London

p. 8 Maria Bicknell (c. 1809), pencil on paper – Tate

p. 12 Barges on the Stour: Gleams of Light on the Meadows or Scene on the River Stour, Suffolk, engraved by David Lucas after Constable, mezzotint, published 1832

p. 14 Claude Lorraine: Landscape with Hagar and the Angel (1646), oil on canvas mounted on wood – National Gallery, London

p. 15 An Overshot Water-wheel, from Intact Sketch-book used in Suffolk and Essex from July till October 1814, pencil on paper – Victoria and Albert Museum, London

p. 17 Frontispiece: Paternal Home and Grounds of the Artist, engraved by David Lucas after Constable, mezzotint, published 1832

p. 19 Golding Constable (1815?), oil on canvas – Tate

p. 22 East Bergholt Common with the Windmill, from Intact Sketch-book used in Suffolk and Essex from July till October 1814, pencil on paper – Victoria and Albert Museum, London

p. 25 Robert Horwood, Map of London, Westminster and Southwark (1799), detail of sheet C3

p. 27 Samuel Freeman and Matthew Dubourg, after Denis Brownell Murphy: Charles Bicknell, stipple engraving, published 1814 – National Portrait Gallery, London

p. 29 Augustus Pugin and Thomas Rowlandson: The Admiralty: Board Room, hand-coloured aquatint, from The Microcosm of London, published by Rudolph Ackermann 1808 – 10

p. 32 David Wilkie: Benjamin Robert Haydon (1815), black and white chalk – National Portrait Gallery, London

p. 43 John Hoppner: Sir George Beaumont (1803), oil on canvas – National Gallery, London

p. 45 Sir Thomas Lawrence: Joseph Farington RA (1796), oil on canvas – Bridgeman Art Library

p. 58 Stoke-by-Nayland Church and Village, from Intact Sketch-book used in Suffolk and Essex from July till October 1814, pencil on paper – Victoria and Albert Museum, London

p. 64 East Bergholt Church (1811), watercolour – National Museums of Liverpool

p. 80 Ann Constable (c. 1800–05), oil on canvas – Tate

p. 87 Augustus Pugin and Thomas Rowlandson: The Royal Academy: Life Room, hand-coloured aquatint, from The Microcosm of London, published by Rudolph Ackermann 1808 – 10

p. 89 Study of Female Nude Lying on her Back (1811), black and white chalk – whereabouts unknown

p. 90 Summer Evening – A Homestead, Cattle Reposing, engraved by David Lucas after Constable, mezzotint, published 1831

p. 102 A Seated Woman from behind, Holding a Child, from Intact Sketch-book used in Suffolk and Essex from July till October 1814, pencil – Victoria and Albert Museum, London

p. 121 Mary Constable (1812), pencil – The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London

p. 122 Augustus Pugin and Thomas Rowlandson: The Royal Academy: The Great Room, hand-coloured aquatint, from The Microcosm of London, published by Rudolph Ackermann 1808–10

p. 123 J. M. W. Turner: Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps, engraved by J. Cousen, published 1859–61 – Tate

p. 131 David Pike Watts (1812), oil on canvas – Private Collection

p. 150 Brantham Mill, from Intact Sketch-book used in Suffolk and Essex from July till October 1814, pencil – Victoria and Albert Museum, London

p. 152 Spring: East Bergholt Common, Hail Squalls – Noon, engraved by David Lucas after Constable, mezzotint, published 1830

p. 176 Head of a Lock on the Stour. Rolling Clouds (based on Landscape: Boys Fishing, 1813), engraved by David Lucas after Constable, mezzotint, published 1831

p. 180 J. M. W. Turner, A Frosty Morning. Sunrise, engraved by R. Brandard, published 1859–61 – Tate

p. 182 Augustus Pugin and Thomas Rowlandson: The British Institution, hand-coloured aquatint, from The Microcosm of London, published by Rudolph Ackermann 1808 – 10

p. 194 Charles Robert Leslie: Joseph Mallord William Turner (1816), pencil – National Portrait Gallery, London

p. 199 Willie Lott’s Cottage Seen over the Stour by Moonlight, from Intact Sketch-book used in Suffolk and Essex in 1813, pencil – Victoria and Albert Museum, London

p. 199 Study of Cows, from Intact Sketch-book used in Suffolk and Essex in 1813, pencil – Victoria and Albert Museum, London

p. 200 Dedham Vale from Langham, from Intact Sketch-book used in Suffolk and Essex in 1813, pencil – Victoria and Albert Museum, London

p. 211 Augustus Pugin and Thomas Rowlandson: Covent Garden Theatre, hand-coloured aquatint, from The Microcosm of London, published by Rudolph Ackermann 1808 –110

p. 219 A Summerland, Rainy Day – Ploughmen. Noon, engraved by David Lucas after Constable, mezzotint, published 1831

p. 230 The Village Feast, East Bergholt, from Intact Sketchbook used in Suffolk and Essex from July till October 1814, pencil on paper – Victoria and Albert Museum, London

p. 231 Warwick House, coloured engraving, 1811

p. 237 The Temple of Concord, Green Park, hand-coloured aquatint, 1814

p. 244 Rhubarb Leaves, from Intact Sketch-book used in Suffolk and Essex from July till October 1814, pencil – Victoria and Albert Museum, London

p. 248 Boat-building near Flatford Mill (1815), oil on canvas – Victoria and Albert Museum, London

p. 251 James Gubbins in Church Street, East Bergholt by Moonlight, from Intact Sketch-book used in Suffolk and Essex from July till October 1814, pencil – Victoria and Albert Museum, London

p. 253 A Cart with Two Horses (1815), oil on paper – Victoria and Albert Museum, London

p. 263 Golding Constable’s Garden (1814 or ’15), pencil – Victoria and Albert Museum, London

p. 272 J. M. W. Turner, Dido Building Carthage, engraved by E. Goodall, published 1859–61 – Tate

p. 281 A Hay Cart, from Intact Sketch-book used in Suffolk and Essex from July till October 1814, pencil – Victoria and Albert Museum, London

p. 285 A Cottage in a Cornfield (Woodman’s Cottage), engraved by David Lucas after Constable, mezzotint, published by Lucas ‘2nd Series’, 1846

p. 288 A Woman Writing at a Table, Watched by a Girl from Intact Sketchbook used in Suffolk and Essex in 1813, pencil – Victoria and Albert Museum, London

p. 306 Maria Bicknell (1816), oil on canvas – Tate

p. 308 Golding Constable’s House East Bergholt, Two Studies on One Sheet (1814), pencil – Victoria and Albert Museum, London

p. 315 Flatford Mill, engraved by David Lucas after Constable, mezzotint, published by Lucas ‘2nd Series’, 1846

p. 320 Augustus Pugin and Thomas Rowlandson: St Martin’s in the Fields, hand-coloured aquatint, from The Microcosm of London, published by Rudolph Ackermann 1808 – 10

p. 328 Maria Constable and Four of her Children, medium and whereabouts unknown, 1822?

p. 332 The Nore, Hadleigh Castle – Morning after a Stormy Night, engraved by David Lucas after Constable, mezzotint, published 1832

1

‘My Dear Sir,’ Maria Bicknell began, ‘His only objection would be on the score of that necessary article Cash.’ But her father’s reservation, though merely financial, was fundamental.

What can we do? To live without it is impossible. It would be involving ourselves in misery instead of felicity. Could we but find this golden treasure we might yet be happy, you say it is not impossible.

I wish I had it, but wishes are vain – we must be wise, and leave off a correspondence that is not calculated to make us think less of each other, we have many painful trials required of us in this life, and we must learn to bear them with resignation.

They could still, she added – like innumerable young women through the ages – be friends.

She was writing to her suitor, a little-known painter named John Constable, on 4 November 1811, while staying at the house of her half-sister, Mrs Sarah Skey, outside Bewdley in Worcestershire.

The house, a mansion named Spring Grove, had been built by Mrs Skey’s father-in-law. It had a porch with Ionic pilasters and, within, a handsome curving staircase surmounted by a domed octagon. Outside there was a conservatory where oranges and lemons grew in profusion and from which rare specimens were sent to the botanic gardens at Kew. Beyond were 270 acres of grounds, landscaped in the style of Capability Brown, with a lake, adroitly placed clumps of trees and serpentine paths.

Altogether, Spring Grove was striking evidence of the wealth and comfort that a good marriage could bring: Mrs Skey lived in this delightful place because it had belonged to her late husband. The evidence was visible all around: Mrs Skey had married very well indeed.

Maria’s letter concerned the opposite state of affairs: the difficulty of marrying without money. John Constable had been courting her for two years and she had fallen in love with him, with the only result that her parents had sent her to stay here in Worcestershire, safely out of his way.

Recently, a letter had arrived from Constable, whom she had not seen for months and never corresponded with at all. This was a clear invitation to resume their relationship and, indeed, to move it decisively forward. To exchange letters with a man was, as everyone knew, implicitly to accept him as a lover. It was a step on the path to the altar. Maria’s dilemma was clear. Her heart urged her to write back, and keep on writing; but prudence and her sense of duty to her parents – who were firmly against this attachment – argued that she should not.

It was often noted during the Georgian era that the British were unusual in their approach to love and marriage. The unexpected thing about them, noted by numerous foreign visitors, was that they so often married for love. In his fable ‘Rasselas’, written in 1759, Dr Johnson described the normal procedure: ‘A youth or maiden meeting by chance, or brought together by artifice, exchange dances, reciprocate civilities, go home and dream of one another.’ Finding themselves uneasy when apart, Johnson observed, they concluded that they should be happy together.

The process the great lexicographer outlined was of course what is usually termed falling in love, and it sounds commonplace enough. But it wasn’t at all usual in the rest of Europe for love to be combined with marriage. Outsiders thought it peculiar that the two should go together in this way. The German novelist Sophie von La Roche noted in 1784 as a feature of the country – along with the rain and the roast beef – that ‘so many love matches are made in England’.

The Duc de la Rochefoucauld, a French aristocrat staying in England, was surprised to discover that English husbands and wives were always to be seen together, and seemed to enjoy each other’s company. In London it was as unusual to come across a married couple apart as it was to meet them together in Paris. An Englishman, he concluded, ‘would rather have the love of the woman he loves than that of his parents’.

Across the Channel, where Roman Law ruled, the choice of spouse was ultimately a matter for the fathers of the bride and groom. In Britain, legally at any rate, it was a matter for the man and woman involved, so long as they were over twenty-one. The marriage service began by checking that this union was the choice of the couple involved: ‘Will you take this woman to be your wife? Will you take this man to be your husband?’ Dr Johnson pronounced that ‘a father had no right to control the inclinations of his daughter in marriage’. Or, to be precise, that he had an entitlement only to influence. ‘The parent’s moral right can arise only from his kindness, and his civil right only from his money.’

Here was the nub of the case of Maria Bicknell. Her father had not told her that she could not marry John Constable. He had merely said that he thought it was a bad idea himself, because that suitor had no money. He, Charles Bicknell, could not or would not provide enough for Maria and Constable to live a comfortable life.

Maria did not think it likely that her father would change his mind. So there was no more to be done. ‘I had better not write to you any more, at least till I can coin, we should both of us be bad subjects for poverty, should we not? Even Painting would go badly, it could not survive in domestic worry.’

Constable’s courtship had begun two years before, but its progress had been slow. Indeed, latterly, all the movement in the affair had been backwards. We do not know exactly where or how John Constable and Maria Bicknell first met, but we do know when. Many years later, he remarked that he had first set eyes on her in 1800 – when he was twenty-four and she was only twelve. Nine years later, however, it was a different matter. She was then twenty-one and he was thirty-three.

There is no mystery about how they met. They were both members, at least intermittently, of the same community: East Bergholt, a large village on the brow of a low hill above the river Stour in Suffolk. According to the 1800 census 970 people lived there, but John Constable and Maria Bicknell were part of the much smaller group – a few dozen at most – of wealthy and prominent inhabitants.

Neither of them was a permanent resident. By 1800, Constable had already departed for London, where he was attempting to become a professional painter. He regularly returned, however – especially in the late summer and autum – to stay with his family. Maria was an occasional visitor to East Bergholt, where her grandfather the Revd Dr Durand Rhudde DD was the rector of the parish (together with two adjoining villages, Brantham and Little Wenham).

She came to stay with her grandparents – partly, perhaps, because her health was fragile and the clear air of Suffolk was expected to do her good. She was there in 1800, and again a few years later. In 1806, when Maria was eighteen, she received a letter from Mrs Everard, a single woman living in the village – one of several whose social lives centred around Dr Rhudde and his entourage of curates.

In the letter, Mrs Everard recalled to Maria the ‘pedestrian rambles’ they had taken together around East Bergholt and addressed her letter, jokingly, to ‘Miss Bicknell, favor’d by Dr Rhudde’. The last point – that Maria was a favourite of her grandfather’s – later had a surprisingly crucial effect on her romance with Constable.

The young John Constable was a remarkably, almost ostentatiously handsome young man. His looks, his personality and his intriguing, even romantic, situation in life combined to make him an object of great interest to young women in the neighbourhood. He seems to have appealed particularly to girls from clerical families – perhaps because they came from bookish backgrounds and were inclined to take an interest in the arts.

In 1799 Ann Taylor, the daughter of a dissenting minister who took up residence in East Bergholt, thought him as ‘finished a model of what is reckoned manly beauty’ as she had ever come upon. She described how one morning she and her four sisters walked over to Bergholt to inspect John’s work, and a portrait of him just finished by a friend, Ramsey Richard Reinagle.

‘We found,’ Ann Taylor recalled, ‘his mother, Mrs Constable, a shrewd-looking, sensible woman, at home. There we were, five girls, all “come to see Mr. John Constable’s paintings”, and as we were about to be shown up to his studio, she turned and said dryly, “Well, young ladies, would you like to go up all together to my son, or one at a time?” I was simpleton enough to pause for a moment, in doubt, but we happily decided upon going en masse.’

That portrait by Reinagle reveals that at twenty-three Constable had chestnut hair, fine eyes, a manly nose and fashionably bushy side-whiskers.

‘There were too,’ Ann Taylor went on, ‘rumours afloat which conferred on him something of the character of a hero in distress, for it was understood that his father greatly objected to his prosecution of painting as a profession and wished to confine him to the drudgery of his own business – that of a miller. To us that seemed unspeakably barbarous, though in Essex and Suffolk a miller was commonly a man of considerable property, and lived as Mr Constable did, in genteel style.’

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John Constable by Ramsey Richard Reinagle

A decade later, Constable was still good-looking, still struggling to make his way as a painter, and his father, Mr Golding Constable, still took the view that John was wasting his time in doing so. In 1816 he observed that it was seven years since he had declared his love to Maria, so we know that event took place in 1809 and also that it happened in East Bergholt where that year Constable stayed from late August until after Christmas. So it was during those four months that their courtship reached an intense phase, and did so, the evidence suggests, against a background of rustic landscape.

In East Bergholt there was the usual round of social interchange – as there also was in Steventon, the Hampshire village where Jane Austen was living at the time. There were routs, dances, tea parties, dinners, card-playing parties and soirées, at any of which Maria Bicknell and he might have encountered one another. Constable, however, was temperamentally averse to parties of most kinds. It was regarded as extraordinary for him to appear at a dance or a game of cards – although his younger brother, Abram, and youngest sister, Mary, were extremely fond of such occasions.

Rather than any social event, it was the walks he and Maria took together that Constable remembered. From the back of his father’s house he looked out over ‘the sweet fields’ where they had been so happy. This was a stretch of gently undulating agricultural land, mostly owned and farmed by Mr Golding Constable, but to the south adjoining the small wood surrounding the rectory. It was therefore an ideal terrain for the two young people to meet and talk freely.

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Maria Bicknell

Maria was unostentatiously pretty, with a wide, oval face, large grey eyes and brown hair something between curly and wavy, one lock of which tended to flop down charmingly over her forehead. Her gaze was mild, steady and intelligent. Much later, he enumerated among her virtues her ‘fine mind’.

During those happy hours of strolling and talking they no doubt established that they had interests in common. Both were keen readers, especially of poetry; both were serious-minded and intelligent; and both had a taste for art. Maria was an amateur painter and at some point, probably that autumn, she tried her hand at a depiction of the mill at Flatford owned by the Constable family.

From what you might call the chemical point of view they were a perfect combination. John Constable’s appearance of manly strength and dashing looks concealed a mass of nervous agitation: he was depressive, hypersensitive, frequently on edge, neurotic – in short, much what you might expect in a painter of great originality. He needed Maria’s steadying calm and rationality; she in turn valued his talent and intelligence.

Under the watching eyes of the rest of the village, Maria and one or more of her sisters – probably Louisa, who was only a year her junior, rather than Catharine, who was still a child – came to take tea with the Constables. The Revd Henry Kebell, one of the curates, was offended that he was not asked too and had to be soothed by Mrs Constable.

By Christmas, as far as Constable at least was concerned, the matter was settled. He would have said, as James Boswell had in 1775 of the woman he chose to be his wife, ‘I only know or fancy that there are qualities and compositions of qualities (to talk in musical metaphor) which in the course of our lives appear to me in her, that please me more than what I have perceived in any other woman, and which I cannot separate from her identity.’

Maria too had formed a deep attachment. It was only afterwards that the difficulties began.

In Georgian England there was considerable social mobility. It was possible to ascend quite rapidly through energy, good fortune and enterprise as Golding, Constable’s father, had – and just as easy to slip down again.

John Constable was living on an allowance of £100 a year, provided rather against his better judgement by his father, plus any small fees that he might earn from painting (and these to date had been meagre and infrequent). This was sufficient to maintain him in a moderately comfortable bachelor existence in lodgings in London – especially as he often spent several months of the year at home in Suffolk. It was not enough to maintain a wife, though, let alone a family, in a genteel manner. For that £400 or £500 would be required.

From Maria’s point of view both marriage and spinster-hood involved hazards. To become the wife of a husband with insufficient income risked poverty for oneself and one’s children, and the prospect of an indigent widowhood, not all that unlikely if the husband were a dozen years older. The early demise of the wife, however, was even more probable, since – in the absence of contraception – many middle-class women were worn out by constant pregnancy and childbirth.

On the other hand, the prospects for an unmarried middle-class woman were also bleak. Maria came from an era of greater female education which was widely, if not universally, agreed to be a great improvement to society. It was, indeed, exactly what made the marriage of intellectual equals a possibility. Dr Johnson observed that ‘All our ladies read now, which is a great extension.’ As a result, he believed, they were more virtuous and faithful to their husbands, ‘because their understandings were better cultivated’.

Unfortunately, there was little work available for them to do with these educated minds and the possibilities that did exist were not attractive. A middle-class spinster could become the companion to a wealthy married woman. This, the authoress and feminist pioneer Mary Wollstonecraft, who had tried it, described as life with ‘intolerably tyrannical’ strangers. ‘It is impossible to enumerate the many hours of anguish such a person must spend. She is alone, shut out from equality and confidence.’ The main alternative career open to educated Georgian women was teaching in a girls’ school, characterized by Wollstonecraft as being ‘only a kind of upper servant, who has more work than the menial ones’.

With a little money, a woman could live alone. The writer William Hayley, biographer of Maria’s favourite poet, William Cowper, summed up such an existence. A woman who had received a ‘polite education’ and spent her ‘sprightly years’ in the house of an opulent father is then reduced to ‘contracted lodgings’ where, in the company of a female servant, she ekes out an existence on the ‘interest of two or three thousand pounds, reluctantly and perhaps irregularly paid to her by an avaricious or extravagant brother’. Not surprisingly, despite all the pitfalls, Georgian women were on the whole keen to get married.

This was what you might call the Jane Austen situation: a finely balanced tussle of heart and head, economic realities and romantic possibilities, duty and desire. Six months older than John Constable, Austen had yet to publish anything. It would be two years before Sense and Sensibility, the first of her novels to appear, came out in October 1811. By then, she had already begun Mansfield Park, the book which, with its contrast of worldly London attitudes and simpler rural life, its richly inhabited Regency landscapes, its delicate and patient heroine, offers the closest fictional parallel to the story of Maria Bicknell and John Constable.

It was obvious even from the letter in which she told him that they must be just friends that Maria loved John Constable. Love was the emotional force that drew them together. There was, however, an unusual complicating factor in the situation: art. Everything was made more difficult by Constable’s determination to be a painter.

John Constable was unconventional in mind and character. That is, and always was, part of the psychological equipment required to become a great artist. After his death, his friend and biographer Charles Robert Leslie analysed Constable thus: ‘With great appearance of docility, he was an uncontrollable man. He said of himself, “If I were bound with chains I should break them, and with a single hair round me I should feel uncomfortable.”’

He showed this stubbornness early on in his choice of career. By his own account, Constable had mused about painting long before he had actually begun to do it. This wish to become an artist was connected with the emotions he felt for a particular place: his own village, and most of all the landscape around the banks of the river Stour. This river, which forms the border between Suffolk and Essex, winds between low hills for the last few miles of its course before reaching its estuary. That area, the parishes of East Bergholt, Dedham, Stratford St Mary, Langham and Nayland, is what eventually became known as ‘Constable country’.

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Engraving of Scene on the River Stour

Constable himself lived long enough to hear those words said. While travelling through the Stour valley in a stagecoach, he remarked to a fellow passenger that the scenery looked beautiful. ‘Yes, sir,’ his companion replied. ‘This is Constable’s country.’ The artist then admitted who he was, in case the man should go on to spoil it. But long before then he knew he painted his ‘own places’ best. By that he meant most of all a small area around the watermill at Flatford that was his father’s property.

These lowland riverside scenes, Constable wrote, ‘made me a painter (& I am grateful) that is I had often thought of pictures of them before I ever touched a pencil’ (by pencil, he and his contemporaries meant what is now called a brush). For an artist to be inspired so powerfully from the beginning by a single spot is so unusual as to be almost unique. The closest analogy in the history of art is the obsession, almost a century later, of Paul Cézanne with the landscape of Mont Sainte-Victoire, in sight of which he had grown up.

It is not clear how Constable even came to know of painting as an activity. He did not see a great and inspiring work of art until he was nineteen years old, in 1795. He was then introduced to a wealthy connoisseur and amateur artist, Sir George Beaumont, whose mother happened to know Constable’s mother. Sir George owned several paintings by Claude, one of which, small enough to be portable, he generally brought with him when he travelled. It depicted the biblical story of Hagar and the Angel but the figures of Hagar, an Egyptian expecting a child by Abraham, and the angel were tucked away in the bottom left-hand corner.

The true subject of the painting was late evening in a river valley. The sinking sun still illuminated the distant hillsides with golden light, the shadows were a soft blue. A river wound away into the distance. Small clouds, tinted the palest delicate yellow, floated above in a mild, milky and delectable sky. To one side was a group of trees, casting refreshing shade on the grass in the foreground. It was a picture of a place not unlike the Stour valley, but in which the everyday landscape was transfigured and classicized.

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Landscape with Hagar and the Angel by Claude Lorraine

The sight of it came to the young John Constable with the force of revelation: a sudden flood of understanding of what a great painting could be. He never forgot the experience. But at that stage he was already an aspiring painter, which was why his mother had sought the meeting with Sir George in the first place.

Certainly, there was no precedent in the Constable family. His father, Golding, was a successful corn merchant, miller and coal transporter. He had inherited the watermill at Flatford from an uncle, Abram Constable, and steadily built up the business. Eventually he ran another mill at Dedham and bought a windmill on East Bergholt Heath, a fleet of river-going barges which he built in his own dry-dock at Flatford, and a merchant brig, The Telegraph, that plied its trade between Mistley, the port at the mouth of the Stour, and London.

All of this amounted to a neatly integrated enterprise. The grain was ground in Constable mills and transported in Constable boats to London, where it was sold. On their return journey, the barges carried commodities such as coal from Tyneside upriver to Bergholt, Dedham, Nayland and Sudbury. At times, Golding had overcome financial difficulties as his son Abram, John’s younger brother, later recalled. But he had won through. From his father, John Constable might have inherited fortitude and patience – both of which he required in his career as a painter – but definitely no artistic genes.

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A Water-wheel

Neither did these seem to derive from his mother’s side of the family. Ann Constable’s father, William Watts, was a successful cooper living in Upper Thames Street, London. The Watts, like the Constables, were upwardly mobile. One of Ann’s brothers, David Pike Watts, became through a freak of fortune remarkably rich. The others were for the most part solidly respectable middle-class people. Their offspring were inclined to become officers in the army and the navy.

The only member of the family with a love of nature even remotely comparable with John’s was his older brother, who was named Golding like their father. There was something odd about this younger Golding: he had fits and he suffered from what his mother fretfully described as ‘apathy’. His intelligence was not affected so gravely that he could not read and write, but his few surviving letters are jerky in style and lack the easy, urbane flow of correspondence by other members of the family. He was not suited, his family concluded, for responsible tasks. It was only in his letters to him that Constable used local dialect, in which for example ‘Bergholt’ turned into ‘Bargell’.

The Constables, who were a close and loving family, looked after Golding and worried about him (somewhat as they did over John’s equally eccentric determination to be a painter). Eventually they arranged for him to have a job as a woodsman in charge of a woodland owned by a local aristocrat, the Earl of Dysart.

Golding, born in 1774, was two years older than John. He, the older male sibling, was his obvious playmate on the banks of the Stour, beside the family mill. The two of them did in fact have one thing in common: a deep feeling for the natural world. In Golding’s case this came out in the more conventional fashion – for a Georgian country gentleman – of hunting. Golding’s one notable ability was that he was a remarkable shot, and the sole way in which he could aid his brother in his art was by providing models in the form of dead game.

In 1808 Constable wanted a woodpecker for a picture – now lost – and Golding accordingly provided it. On 9 December 1807, the youngest of the Constable family, Mary, wrote a letter to John, or, as she addressed him, ‘My dearest Johnny’. ‘This morning,’ it began, ‘Golding took the fatal aim at the beautiful woodspite [the local name of the bird], which my mother sends you, and under its wing it will convey these few lines from me.’

The Constable family home was named, with a touch of self-satisfaction, ‘East Bergholt House’. It was a visible sign of Golding Constable’s achievements in life. He had bought the land on which it was constructed in 1772 and had a house erected on it – presumably according to his own ideas.

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Engraving of East Bergholt House and Garden

Like Golding Constable himself, his dwelling was solid, substantial and very English. It was three storeys high, built of red brick. The main door had a pediment above it, and over that a Venetian window. At the front there was a curving drive, leading in from the village street on which John once sketched some of the Constable family’s dogs lazing in the sun. To one side of the main building was the counting house – Golding’s office and a laundry. There were stables to the back, and a handsome barn a little further away across Golding Constable’s fields.

The entire arrangement was imposing and caught people’s eyes. A passing writer named Frederick Shoberl, who compiled the Suffolk volume of The Beauties of England and Wales (1812), noted that ‘Old Hall’, the manor house and seat of the squire, Mr Peter Godfrey, together with ‘the residences of the rector, the Reverend D Rhudde, Mrs Roberts, and Golding Constable, Esq’ gave East Bergholt ‘an appearance far superior to most villages’.

This passage in the book caused John Constable such pride that he was still quoting it decades later, long after the Constables ceased to live in the place. East Bergholt House was the architectural expression of Golding Constable’s position in the village, which was almost that of leading citizen. In 1785, when John was nine, John Crosier of Maldon jotted down that in East Bergholt ‘A Mr Golding Constable, a man of fortune and a miller has a very elegant house in the street and lives in the style of a country squire.’

Golding was a local figure of note. He was director of the workhouse at Tattingstone (which he conveniently happened to supply with corn), he was one of the commissioners of the River Stour Navigation board – the river had been canalized in the early eighteenth century, and the locks and towpaths required constant supervision. In 1787 he bought the ecclesiastical equivalent of East Bergholt House – a family pew in the parish church. This was in the north side of the middle aisle, near that of his neighbour Mrs Roberts.

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Golding Constable, 1815?

When Golding Constable’s brig The Telegraph was launched on 19 August 1797, the local newspaper, the Ipswich Journal, devoted a lengthy piece to the event: ‘… an immense concourse of people were assembled, who testified their approbation by repeated acclamations, with good wishes for her success, and the long life and property of her worthy owner. An handsome entertainment was provided at the Crown Inn, where many loyal, constitutional toasts, appropriate to the occasion, were drunk.’

Golding Constable’s rise was recent and rapid enough to attract the jealousy of another proud, self-made man: the rector, Maria’s grandfather, Durand Rhudde. But Golding Constable’s wealth was dependent on the continuance of his business; for the most part it didn’t consist of property or land. His financial position had large implications for his son John, both as an aspiring artist and a would-be married man.

In the first place, the Constables were a little too well off for their son to consider art as a profession. In England, painters had only recently risen from the ranks of artisans. Now a few, pre-eminently Joshua Reynolds, had achieved the rank and income of gentlemen. Still it was far from being an obvious career for the son of a prosperous man such as Golding Constable.

If his father had been less wealthy, there would have been less objection to Constable becoming a painter. In fact, his antecedents were not unlike those of Thomas Gainsborough (1727–88), an earlier master of the East Anglian landscape.

The Gainsboroughs came from Sudbury, a dozen miles up the Stour at the end of the journey for Golding Constable’s barges, and they, too, were upwardly mobile. Thomas’s uncle was a successful businessman. But crucially his father, John Gainsborough, failed in trade, went bankrupt and ended up as the Sudbury postmaster. So when young Thomas showed precocious talent as a painter, there was no question as to what he should do. He was sent to London at the age of thirteen to learn his art.

Constable, in contrast, was brought up as a gentleman. He was sent away to school at Fordstreet in Essex, then Lavenham in Suffolk, where the boys were beaten by a brutal usher – to Constable’s lasting anger. His family, kind and humane, took him away and sent him instead to the grammar school at Dedham, a pleasant walk away down across the Stour. This was a good school, with several notable alumni, presided over by the Revd Dr Thomas Grimwood.

There Constable was happy and, according to his friend and biographer C. R. Leslie, who was no doubt relying on Constable’s own recollections, a favourite. ‘Dr Grimwood had penetration enough to discover that he was a boy of genius, although he was not remarkable for proficiency in his studies, the only thing he excelled in being penmanship. He acquired however, some knowledge of Latin, and subsequently took private lessons in French, in which he made less progress.’ (Maria was the one who eventually mastered that language.)

By that stage, at sixteen or seventeen, Constable was already set on becoming an artist. ‘During his French lessons a long pause would frequently occur, which his master would be the first to break, saying, “Go on, I am not asleep: Oh! Now I see you are in your painting-room.”’ This studio – known to his mother, Ann Constable, as his ‘shop’ – was a little two-storey structure in the village street near the entrance to East Bergholt House.

Another aspect of their son’s enthusiasm that made Golding and Ann Constable uneasy was his growing friendship with the only other person in East Bergholt who was keen on painting: the local plumber and glazier, John Dunthorne. Constable often sketched with Dunthorne, either in the plumber’s cottage or out in the fields. Golding Constable made a joke – and a muddled-reference worthy of Mrs Malaprop – when he saw them coming home: ‘Here comes Don Quixote with his Man Friday.’

This expressed Golding’s feelings about the whole matter. The idea of becoming a painter was folly, and Dunthorne an unsuitably rude and mechanical ally. The relationship with the plumber indeed suggested exactly where this might all be leading: down the social ladder. His parents’ original plan for John was for him to go into the church – a conventional path for an educated young man from a family with money. The career choices for a gentleman without independent means were few. When, in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Mary Crawford expresses surprise that Edmund Bertram was intending to become a clergyman, he replied, ‘Why should it surprise you? You must suppose me designed for some profession, and might perceive I am neither a lawyer, nor a soldier, nor a sailor.’

When it became clear that John had no appetite for the necessary studies’ required of a man of the cloth, he went instead into the family business for a while. At one point he was responsible for supervising the post mill on East Bergholt Common – the one visible from the rear of the Constables’ house. This task he performed, according to Leslie, ‘carefully and well’ and he was known for a while around the village as ‘the handsome miller’. He was, his biographer related, ‘remarkable among the young men of the village for personal strength, and being tall and well formed, with good features, a fresh complexion and fine dark eyes, his white hat and coat were not unbecoming to him’.

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East Bergholt Common with the Windmill

He continued to help his father for several years, while pressing to be allowed to become a painter. Eventually, when it became clear that the youngest of the Constable sons – Abram, seven years John’s junior – was much more cut out for the trades of milling grain and transporting coal, John was reluctantly allowed to begin his artistic training at the Royal Academy Schools in London. This was not, however, until early 1799, when he was almost twenty-four. His father thought then that he was ‘pursuing a shadow’, and nothing had happened to change that view a decade later.

Constable’s financial and social background had a crucial effect on his attitude to art – it gave him a sense of independence. He painted because he wanted to, not because he had to, and as far as possible, he painted what he wished. In this he resembled later artists such as Cézanne or Van Gogh – eccentric middle-class mavericks both of them, like Constable. He worked for money on occasion, but always grudgingly. His real aim was ‘reputation’ – a fame like that of Claude or Ruisdael – rather than profit or immediate popularity. This was one of the attitudes that made Constable a distinctively modern artist.

There were, however, severe limitations to his independence. Golding Constable could afford to keep two sons in idleness – Golding junior and John – plus two daughters who remained at home (only the middle one, Martha, was married). What he could not do was support a son with little or no income, plus a wife and an unknown number of children.

Quixotic and uncontrollable in the matter of marriage as he had been over his choice of career, John ignored these practicalities.