C. Lewis Hind

“ It has not the learning of "The Hay Wain" or "The Leaping Horse," and the steady flame of Constable's fame would probably long ago have been extinguished had it depended for existence entirely upon his sketches; but, speaking for myself, it is to his sketches that I go for joy. Verily this student of Nature, who disliked autumn and loved spring; who painted summer, "its breezes, its heat, its heavy colouring," its gusts of winds, its sudden storms; verily he lives in our hearts wherever our eyes meet his sketches. ”

“ Perhaps the sacrifices I make for lightness and brightness are too great, but these things are the essence of landscape, and my extreme is better than white-lead and oil, and dado painting." Probably no other landscape painter has expressed the intention of his art as clearly in writing as with his brushes. Light! The light of Nature! The mother of all that is valuable in painting! That was Constable's secret—the knowledge of light, a secret that was hidden from the eyes of worthy Sir George Beaumont. ”

“ No doubt these cultured moderns desired in a painting the "beauty touched with strangeness," that Botticelli and Piero della Francesca offer: there is no place in such æsthetic lives for the familiarity touched with honesty of John Constable. To-day his innovations—his attempts to represent the vibration of light, his spots and splashes of colour to counterfeit the sun glitter, his touches and scrapings laid on with the palette knife to obtain force and brightness—have become a commonplace.
Constable, being a pioneer, was accustomed to misunderstanding and also to badinage. ”

“ As if frightened out of originality by the horrors of the French Revolution of 1789, the landscape painters of France for thirty years and more remained steeped in the apathy of classicism.
David (1748-1825) dominated the French art world, and no mere landscape painter was able to dispel the heavy tradition that David imposed in historical painting. True there were protestors, original men (there always are) , but they were powerless to stem the turgid stream. ”

“ The stay-at-home Dutchmen who flooded the seventeenth century with their simple, homely, and often beautiful landscapes had no attraction for grandiose Sir George and his kin. The genius of Watteau which flashed into the eighteenth century, the commanding performances of Richard Wilson and Gainsborough in landscape, had no influence upon the practitioners of the grand manner. ”

“ The life of Turner might inspire a poem; but plain prose is the only vehicle for a consideration of the life of Constable. He was a sane, level-headed man compact of common-sense and practicality, a man of one great, embracive idea: that having studied the science of picture-making from the earlier masters, the landscape painter must learn from Nature and not from the derivative pictures of his contemporaries. Constable pursued that course with the single-heartedness of a man who devotes his life to some great commercial undertaking. ”

“ The French have been forcibly struck by them, and they have created a division in the school of the landscape painters of France. You are accused of carelessness by those who acknowledge the truth of your effect; and the freshness of your pictures has taught them that though your means may not be essential, your end must be to produce an imitation of Nature, and the next Exhibition in Paris will teem with your imitators, or the school of Nature versus the school of Birmingham. ”

“ It was in this year while at Bergholt that he wrote to his wife from a grateful and overflowing heart a letter of which the following is an extract:—"Everything seems full of blossom of some kind, and at every step I take, and on whatever subject I turn my eyes, that sublime expression of the Scriptures, 'I am the resurrection and the life,' seems as if uttered near me." ”

“ Claude's drawings, preserved in the British Museum, proclaim that he could be as frank, delightful, and impulsive as Constable in his sketches; but when Claude constructed a landscape of ruined temples and fatuous biblical or legendary figures, the inspiration of his drawing usually evaporated. Claude's genius remained, and there are pictures by him, notably "The Enchanted Castle," that in their particular manner have never been surpassed; but alas! it was not the genius that Sir George Beaumont imitated, but Claude's mannerisms and limitations. ”

“ The association of gentlemen need not have been apprehensive that the "boldness of the execution" of "Salisbury from the Meadows" would have frightened succeeding generations. The Munich Secessionists would call it commonplace, and the most old-fashioned member of the selecting committee of a current Royal Academy Exhibition would see in it only a fine picture, forcibly painted but too insistent on detail. The landscape point of view has changed since 1837. ”

“ Constable was never dramatic ("The Opening of Waterloo Bridge" may be counted an exception) or idealistic like Turner. From a scenic point of view, "The Hay Wain" is dull compared with "Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus," and knowledge of art history is not so widely diffused as to give to "The Hay Wain" the interest it should command as a pioneer picture in modern landscape. Constable does not thrill. Roast beef does not thrill, but it is wholesome and life-communicating. Constable was a prosaic man of genius. ”

“ Several changes were made in the picture after its exhibition at the Royal Academy, which the curious can verify by a study of the full-sized sketch at South Kensington. From this year onward the movement of Nature and the brilliancy of objects in sunlight intrigued him more and more, although his passion for light never reached the white-hot fervour of Turner in his latter years. For Turner the sunrise, a world almost too beautiful and evanescent to be real ”

“ I shall begin painting as soon as I have the loan of a sweet little picture by Jacob Ruysdael to copy." No doubt he learned much from copying Ruysdael and other masters, but Nature was his real tutor. Later in the year he writes from Ipswich:
"It is a most delightful country for a painter. I fancy I see Gainsborough in every hedge and hollow tree." And in 1802 he makes that memorable communication by letter to Dunthorne after a visit to Sir George Beaumont's pictures, to which reference has already been made. ”

“ Constable's British contemporaries being men of genius of various degrees, men of individual vision, it is quite natural that his influence upon them should have been almost negligible. Turner, Old Crome, and Bonington owed nothing to Constable; but in France it was different. In the early years of the nineteenth century when Englishmen were producing magnificent work which was to bring them such great posthumous fame and such small rewards during their lifetime, landscape painting in France was still slumbering in classical swathing-bands. ”

“ I am much indebted to the artists for their alarum in my favour; but I must do justice to the Count, who is no artist I believe, and thought that as the colours are rough they should be seen at a distance. ”

“ In the interval between the painting of "The Hay Wain" and its exhibition in Paris, he produced "Salisbury from the Bishop's Garden," now in the South Kensington collection, wherein he attempted to represent the glitter of sunlight by spots of pure pigment which his friends called "Constable's snow." To us, accustomed to modern pictures of sunlight, the "spots and scumbles of pure pigment" in "Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop's Garden" are hardly noticeable, but in 1823 they were an innovation, although not altogether a new discovery. ”

“ This picture, perhaps the best known and most popular of his works, was presented to the National Gallery in 1837, by an association of gentlemen, who purchased it of the painter's executors. Some of them wished to substitute for this gift the fine "Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows" with the rainbow, of which the "Salisbury," No. 1814, in the National Gallery, is a study, but "the boldness of its execution" we are told "stood in its way," and the "Cornfield" was purchased instead. ”

“ That picture, which is now in the National Gallery, marked an epoch in landscape art.
Reams have been written about the influence of "The Hay Wain" upon French art, by critics who are all for Constable, by critics who are complimentary but temperate; and by critics who are lukewarm and almost resentful of the place claimed for Constable as protagonist of nineteenth century landscape art. A guerilla critical warfare has also raged around the influence of Turner. Constable and Turner! Most modern landscape painters have, at one time or another, learnt from these two great pioneers. ”

“ In those eighty-five years landscape painting has progressed at a faster rate than in all the preceding centuries. In 1824 "The Hay Wain" was a fresh vision, very new and arresting. Why? Simply because Constable returned to Nature and painted Nature. Again and again has this happened in the history of art from the time of Giotto onwards. The little men falter on, copying one another, "studying pictures only," in Constable's phrase; the public accepts their wooden performances as true art ”

“ So wrote the wise Leslie in a chapter narrating certain passages of art talk between Constable and Sir George Beaumont, when the painter was visiting the amiable baronet at Cole-Orton. The modern world is a little amused by Sir George Beaumont—collector, connoisseur, and painter—who, in his own ripe person, precisely and accurately exemplified Constable's criticism of certain French artists. "They study (and they are very laborious students) pictures only." ”

“ His survey of the history of landscape painting closed with an eulogy of Wilson, Gainsborough, Cozens, and Girtin, and I may close with a brief passage, essential Constable, from the lecture delivered at Hampstead on 25th July 1836. "The landscape painter must walk in the fields with a humble mind. No arrogant man was ever permitted to see Nature in all her beauty. ”

“ The fiddle story can be told in fewer words. Sir George having recommended the colour of an old Cremona fiddle for the prevailing tone of everything in Nature, Constable answered by laying an old fiddle on the green lawn before the house.
Sir George Beaumont was one of the last of the servile disciples of Claude Lorraine and the Poussins, who conjured their followers into believing that a landscape must be composed in the grand or "classical" manner, and must conform to certain academic rules. ”

“ The life of a painter is not usually exciting, and Constable's life was no exception, Here are a few dates. In 1802, at the age of twenty-six, he exhibited his first picture, under the unambitious title "A Landscape," at the Royal Academy ”