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Literary Review
England's Constable
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Unprecedentedly, a major exhibition of the paintings of John Constable (1776-1837) was recently on show in Paris. CHRISTOPHER HURST takes a look.
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ENGLAND may have produced the world's greatest poet, but we are the first to admit that our musical composers have never been a match for the great German and Austrian masters, or our painters for the Italians and Flemish of the late medieval and Renaissance periods, the Spanish and Dutch of the 17th Century, or the French of the 19th Century. However, we hold fast to what we have. While we do not dispute the greatness of the Czech Dvorak, the Finnish Sibelius and the Norwegian Grieg, their contemporary Late Romantic Edward Elgar's "Enigma" variations, his symphonic works and his "Pomp and Circumstance" marches have the power, under certain circumstances, to bring a lump to the English music-lover's throat — and never more so than when they are played outside this country. Our hearts swell with patriotic pride. When a visiting Austrian brass band, playing in the Covent Garden piazza close to my office a few summers ago, began its programme with the "Pomp and Circumstance" march no.5, I had to mop away a tear. I thanked the bandmaster for his gesture, but could hardly get the words out. For related reasons, I felt I had no choice but to visit the Constable exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris.
Because our major painters are few, our opinions as to their relative merits tend to be firmly held and to arouse lively debate. Of the best-known 18th-Century potraitists, do we prefer Gainsborough or Reynolds? And when it comes to the great landscape painters of the early 19th Century, does Turner or Constable take the ultimate accolade? To consider only the latter pair, Turner's technique, whether in drawing, in watercolour or in oil painting, was without exception masterly. He lived a solitary life, devoted only to his art, and left behind a vast accumulation of finished works; the many which he still possessed at his death he bequeathed to the nation, being unmarried and having no family. In his final years he experimented with light and colour in daring ways: two of his most famous works, to be seen in London's National Gallery, not only use heightened colour in a way that defies nature, but bring in motifs from the new age of machines and speed in a fascinating way. One shows an early railway train, its steam locomotive with a tall smoke-stack, speeding across a viaduct — there is no background, only swirling light. The other, called "The Fighting Temeraire", shows an old wooden-hulled warship from the time of the Napoleonic wars being towed to its last berth to be broken up — by a small and ungainly black steam tug, belching smoke. Both pictures, especially the latter, are full of symbolism, but I doubt if Turner wanted to do more than make the viewer reel for a moment from the impact of his incomparable skill.
Constable was a very different figure. He was born a few years later than Turner, and died earlier. Turner's work is not without an international flavour, since he painted the French-Italian Alps, Venice and Rome, as well as his native country, but Constable never left England. Indeed, spiritually he never left the deeply rural Stour valley in the eastern English county of Suffolk where he grew up. He worked for a time in London, living in Hampstead, then a village separate from the metropolis, and with a splendid southward view from its heights overlooking it. He never went further than the Lake District in the north, but its dramatic scenery, which would have been a gift to Turner, evidently did not appeal to him greatly. On the other hand he gained inspiration from the seacoast, fishermen and their boats — particularly in the fashionable resort of Brighton, where he took his family when his wife became ill. The only other geographic location particularly associated with Constable is the southern city of Salisbury, where the bishop was his friend. His pictures of Salisbury cathedral and its surroundings, in all weathers, are among his best known.
Constable was the son of a merchant, who, in spite of a wish to have his son enter his business, assented early to his desire to be a painter. Although the father's circumstances were comfortable, this did not prevent the professional-clerical family of his beloved, Maria Bicknell, refusing to countenance her marriage to a man from the merchant class. He only married her after a courtship of some eight years; they had seven children, and she died of consumption at the age of 40, leaving him disconsolate.
His art developed, as it were, in a straight line; he did not experiment. Yet his work marked a sharp departure from that of his time. Other painters before Constable had specialised and achieved mastery in landscape — the 17th-Century Dutchman Jacob van Ruysdael being a prime example — but once he had achieved technical mastery he handled his materials with increasing freedom. Some of his paintings are carefully detailed; others are distinctly impressionistic. The former can claim comparison with a close French contemporary, Camille Corot (1796-1875), but Corot's freer landscapes do not have the powerful immediacy of Constable's, which are more easily compared with the full-blown late 19th/early 20th-Century Impressionists Monet, Pissarro and Sisley. In fact, no one has ever exceeded Constable's ability to depict nature, and especially the sky, in exactly the way, and in exactly the colours, that we all see it, yet with an intensity that is the essence of his artistic achievement.
A particular feature of Constable's work was his production of large "studio" pictures measuring up to five by six feet. These were based on oil sketches he painted in the open air to "natural" sizes, then sketched again in the much larger size destined for the finished product, and finally worked up in detail for exhibition at the Academy. These are his most famous works, and their titles — "The Hay Wain", "The Leaping Horse", "The Corn Field" — have entered into our language rather like the titles of Shakespeare's plays. Not only the titles but the images themselves are familiar to many who have never seen the originals from the multitude of cheap reproductions — on calendars, china plates and chocolate boxes. Equally impressive examples of this art are "Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows", "The Opening of Waterloo Bridge" and the somewhat grim "Hadleigh Castle". The sensitive prefer the smaller landscapes as being more intimate and truer to life, as indeed they are, but the studio pictures are majestic in concept and effect, and lack nothing in their representation of nature. If they are heightened representations, that does not detract from their greatness as art.
A surprisingly large number of these works are included in the Paris exhibition, which was selected by Lucian Freud — now regarded by many (myself included) as this country's premier living artist. Freud states that he owes some of his early inspiration to a small oil painting of a tree trunk by Constable, but adds that he has expressed that inspiration in his depiction of the human (female) nude. His selection includes more of Constable's portraits than seems justified: most of them are little known, with reason since some are embarrassingly poor. But the same can be said of the landscapes which have come down from our great portraitist Gainsborough. It so happens that Corot was a master in portraiture (on a small scale) as well as landscape.
It was heart-warming for this Englishman to see so many French art-lovers, who can afford to feel smug when the talk is of impressionism, apparently taking seriously and enjoying the works of our greatest painter.
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