Constable

I was recently prompted by Seth at reference 1 to take another look at Gombrich’s famous book at reference 2, where much is made of the early nineteenth century landscape painter, John Constable (1776-1837). So a review of the biography of Constable at reference 3 in the NYRB caught my eye and resulted in purchase of the book at reference 4.

A rather cheaply produced book, some 450 pages of it, not at all a coffee table book, not even a well-produced book, but, as Hamilton points out, the value of fancy illustrations in books is now much reduced by the presence of so many good quality images on the Internet which can easily be turned up by Google or Bing. Perhaps books of this sort will come to include the sort of square barcodes which you scan with your telephone – and up comes the picture on your laptop.

The book starts with Constable’s family, a prosperous East Anglian family into the milling of grain and various ancillary trades, with outposts in London, and then moves onto the intellectual and artistic circles of Constable’s day. All a bit breathless, with a regular avalanche of names, but a lot more readable than I was expecting from appearances.

I learn that by the time Constable was a young man, the profession of painter was well established in England. Plenty of amateurs too. Plenty of books, plenty of interest. The Royal Academy was up and running and there were plenty of places at which or people from whom one could learn the trade. Very much a contemporary of Turner (1775-1851), with whom he might be said to have been both in competition and contention.

Constable the man

Driven by his art. Forever sketching and painting. Both outdoors, indoors and at the easel. In the beginning, he made a little money from portraits, but gradually moved across to landscapes. Slowly creating the market for the sort of landscapes he wanted to paint.

After a long courtship, a loving marriage to Maria Bicknell, 1795-1828. She died young, worn down by seven children and tuberculosis.

A worrier, both about his money and about his work. A series of serious male friendships with people of more or less the same social situation - but not people in the same line of business, that is to say fellow painters. He needed a sounding board, not a competitor. A series of less symmetrical relationships with his betters, some of them connoisseurs, a few of them patrons.

A serious letter writer – his collected letters run to seven volumes – and a serious keeper of a journal. I associate to the letters of Van Gogh which we once came across and Ely and noticed at reference 11.

But a bit free with his emotions and with his mouth. He quarrelled with people, sometimes seriously. A tendency which probably slowed his admission to the Royal Academy. Another problem was his pursuit of a new kind of landscape, not what most Academicians and patrons were looking for. What about the gods and nymphs?

Towards the end of his life, he did well as both as a giver of public lectures and as a teacher at the Royal Academy.

National Gallery: the Hay Wain

I was moved by all this to go and take a look at the ‘Hay Wain’ at the National Gallery, along with two others which are presently hung in the same room. With a rather dark version being snapped above.

I was immediately struck, in a way that does not happen to me very often, by what a wonderful picture this was.

A second thought was that pictures of this sort do need a frame, and that the elaborate frames favoured at the time of painting work well, providing a sort of dead zone, a no man’s land between the world of the painting and the world outside. In the past, I have noticed the same thing with films: you need them to be framed too, by advertisements, credits or whatever.

Tate Britain: the opening of Waterloo Bridge

Then a few days later, to take a look at the ‘Opening of Waterloo Bridge’ at Tate Britain. Where I might say that viewing conditions, in a Constable room in the middle of the Turner gallery, were a lot better than they were at the National Gallery, partly because of there being a lot fewer people about, but also because they had put a bench at just the right point for comfortable viewing. But not very impressed by the quality of the snap above.

Unlike the ‘Hay Wain’, it took a while for this picture to grow on me, possibly because I did not know it at all beforehand. But grow on me it did. I was also very impressed by some of the very small, coloured sketches elsewhere in the room.

A viewing which confirmed the impression that Constable’s finished landscapes got more impressionistic as time went on.

Taking to two together, further evidence of my taste for the complicated in painting. I like there to be a depth of composition, to be a variety of things to take an interest in, for there to be complexity. I associate to the talk of wine buffs, for whom complexity seems to be a synonym for good; a good wine must have it.

I pondered about the proper place for such large paintings, too big and too complicated for the average suburban house, certainly for my suburban house. Perhaps the present mix of public galleries and the houses of rich men (and women) is the way it has to be. 

Hamilton on wood engraving

I learned from one of the pages at the front of this book, that Hamilton has written extensively on art, particularly on the art of Turner and his time. While among the list of his books was one about the wood engraving of twentieth century Britain (reference 6) – the one which caught my eye, given my family connection to George Mackley, a wood engraver active in the middle part of the century and who rates the short Wikipedia entry at reference 8.

So I thought to take a look and fairly quickly turned up the Internet Archive at reference 7, from which I was able to borrow a copy of the book. Borrowing a book from a library hosted on the Internet being a new concept for me, presumably the result of some kind of a deal made between the Internet Archive and the custodians of the copyright of the stuff they were archiving.

My copy appears to have come from the library of Chester College, a rather short-lived university in New Hampshire, founded in 1965 and closing about fifty years later. I was a little disappointed to find that the quality of both type face and reproductions on my screens, both large and small, was poor. It was not clear whether the fault lay with the book itself or with the quality of its digitisation.

In any event, a rather breathless gallop through what might be regarded as the swan-song of the art of wood engraving, between the demise of wood engraved illustrations in books, magazines and newspapers and the demise of what might be called the ‘craft’ approach to art towards the end of the twentieth century. The arrival of the conceptualists who figure so largely in Tate Britain these days. Of Dame Trace and Cadaver Hirst.

I come away with the impression that Hamilton does not much care for the work of Mackley, which I suspect him of regarding as fussy, pedantic and a bit light on human interest. To which one response might be that Constable, for the purposes of his art, was a lot more interested in trees and clouds than in people.

Some thoughts

A driven and complicated man. Very much part of the Romantic era, a contemporary and acquaintance, if not friend, of Wordsworth.

An artist at a time when the profession was dominated by the Royal Academy, when the balance of purchasing power was shifting from the aristocracy to the men who had done well in trade and business and when exhibitions of paintings were becoming accessible to the public at large, no longer restricted to the houses of said aristocracy. A time when artists, a bit like the clergy, hovered between being the guests of the aristocracy and being the hired help. From where I associate to my musical brother, who caught echoes of this when performing at weddings and other social events.

Most of the artists seemed to come from the middling classes. It certainly helped to have some substance in your background to take an interest and to pay to get you started – although someone with talent from a humble background might make way by becoming the hired help in the studio of an established artist or engraver.

But despite any aristocratic connections they may have made, they had to make a living. They had to pay for their materials, their studios, their travel and their families. John Martin, another contemporary (references 8 and 9), did well out of the three part model. First you exhibit your painting for two shillings a go – a quite substantial sum at the time, perhaps a day’s wages for a working man. Perhaps putting it on tour. Then you sell it, perhaps for £200. Then you borrow it back, get it engraved and sell the engravings to all comers. All comers who often used them to decorate their homes. Engravings which might fetch £200 on eBay now. Engravings which might involve commercial squabbles between artists, engravers and print sellers. Which might be something of a speculation. Would the engraving do justice to the painting? Would it sell?

So one had one’s art, one got quite exalted about it. As did a few friends, fellow artists and connoisseurs. But at the same time, one usually had to produce something that would sell. There was no escaping the taint of trade.

Then there may be cases when the act of creation is enough for an artist - which is all there is in some funerary art – and some cathedral sculpture, only very rarely seen, and then not by the public at large – thinking here of some of the sculptures high up on the roofs and buttresses. One gets something of the idea when climbing up the new staircase to the triforium of Westminster Abbey. But most of the time, the creator is looking forward to someone sharing his creation. Pepys, for example, may not have intended his contemporaries to read his diaries, but, according to Wikipedia, an account elaborated in section III of the introduction to the magisterial Latham & Matthews edition, he tried to make sure that it survived for posterity. As, in the event, it eventually did, surfacing in the library of Magdalene College, Cambridge, more than a century after his death.

And for that purpose, a painter of pictures has to sell them, or at the very least to persuade an art gallery that they are worth house room.

Conclusions

Despite the appearance and length of the book itself, an easy and interesting read. Which brought home to me, despite long acquaintance with art galleries, how little I knew of the life and work of this famous English artist.

A lucky find.

Next stop: hunt down some of his portraits? Take a look at some of the prints held in the Tate archive? Pay a visit to the V&A, from where the opening snap of a portrait of Constable as a young man has been lifted.

PS 1: I was interested to read about the bridge at reference 12, with the massive and imposing Victorian bridge celebrated by Constable lasting barely a 100 years – before being rebuilt using a lot of female labour. Labour commemorated by a substantial tablet in one of the passages in and around the bridge, a tablet which we found once by accident and have failed to find since.

PS 2: Constable's ghost may not be too impressed by his posterity on calendars and chocolate boxes. Rather as (the writer) Hardy was not best pleased in later life that people were more interested in cuddly tales about a rose-tinted country-life past, than in his poetry or in the real, today, issues with which he grappled in his novels.

References

Reference 1: Being You: A New Science of Consciousness – Anil Seth – 2021.

Reference 2: Art & Illusion: A study in the psychology of pictorial representation – E. H. Gombrich – 1960.

Reference 3: Constable’s Quiet Tumult: John Constable’s lifelong struggle was to convey his deep feelings for his native countryside to a reluctant public, which preferred escapist historical tableaux and portraits of grandees – Christopher Benfey, New York Review of Books – 2023.

Reference 4: Constable: A portrait – James Hamilton – 2022. 

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Constable. 

Reference 6: Wood engraving and the woodcut in Britain c1890-1990 – James Hamilton – 1994.

Reference 7: https://archive.org/. 

Reference 8: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2011/11/huge-queer-and-tawdry.html.

Reference 9: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Martin_(painter). 

Reference 10: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Mackley. Looks to have been lifted from https://brierhillgallery.com/george-mackley/. 

Reference 11: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2018/11/cathedral.html. 

Reference 12: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterloo_Bridge.