Thomas Constable

“ At the approach of the main royal army from the south Westmorland fled, with Northumberland, across the border into the country of the Kers, living for a time in the castle of Ferniehurst, Roxburghshire (cf. Memorials, p. 114) . Sir Robert Constable, an English spy, was employed to try and induce the earl, who was a connection by marriage (cf. Testamenta Vetusta, p. 705) , to come into England, and from Constable's house sue for pardon ”

“ No wonder the place made Constable an artist, and an artist whose name will not speedily pass away. My dear sir or madam, the next time you are on your way from London to Ipswich, don’t rush along at express speed; get out at Ardleigh, make your way to the Vale of Dedham, then walk along the Stour, and cross it by a couple of rustic bridges, and you are at East Bergholt, in Suffolk, where Constable was born, and if you do so you will bless me evermore. ”

“ He was a knight of the shire for Yorkshire and then for Warwickshire, and was a member of the Council of the North from 1537 until his death. Another noteworthy member of this family was the regicide, Sir William Constable (d. 1655) , who was created a baronet in 1611. A member of the Long Parliament, he fought with distinction among the parliamentarians at Edgehill; in 1644 his military enterprises in north Yorkshire were very successful, and later he guarded the king at Carisbrooke, and was governor of Gloucester. ”

“ A motto, in truth, worthy of any of the seven sages—applicable to many things besides painting—and which can scarcely be applied in vain to any. Not many things imperfectly, but a few well!
With these imperfect remarks on the general character of Constable's pictures, we pass at once to a few extracts from the correspondence, which, as we have already said, makes up the substance of the present volume. Among the letters, by much the most striking and amusing are those of Constable's early and steady friend, Archdeacon Fisher—an admirable judge of art, and himself a very respectable artist. ”

“ The four sonnets to that distinguished "perticular," the King of Scotland, seem to have won for the author a great deal of fame, for Bolton mentions one of them as a witness to his opinion that "noble Henry Constable was a great master in English tongue, nor had any gentleman of our nation a more pure, quick, or higher delivery of conceit." The King himself the poet is said to [Pg 85] have met personally when on his propagandist tours in Scotland; for Constable was an ardent Roman Catholic, and spent most of his life in plots for the re-establishment of that faith in England. ”

“ On the 9th, the day of the battle, ‘the captain of the left wing was old Sir Marmaduke Constable, and with him was Master William Percy, his son-in-law, William Constable, his brother, Sir Robert Constable, Marmaduke Constable, William Constable, his sons, and Sir John Constable of Holderness, with divers his kinsmen, allies, and other gentlemen of Yorkshire and Northumberland’ (contemporary news-letter printed by Ric. Fawkes; reprint, Garret, 1822) . ”

“ Difficult position of Aske, Sir R. Constable, and Lord Darcy.
Nothing could have been more fortunate for the government, nothing more vexatious to all intelligent friends of the insurrection, than this preposterous outbreak. If the king desired to escape from the conditions of Doncaster, a fresh commotion furnished him with a fair excuse. Constable sent out orders, [223] imperiously [Pg 186] commanding every one to remain quiet. The Duke of Norfolk, he said, was coming only with his private retinue to listen to the complaints of the people. ”

“ We may be sure that he would not have been averse to a clandestine meeting, for in writing to that arch-plotter, the Countess of Shrewsbury, Arabella's doting grandmother, he says: "It is more convenient to write unto your Ladyship, than to come unto you or to make any other visits either by day or night till I have further liberty granted me;" besides this, the Earl of Shrewsbury was distantly related to Constable's family, and this [Pg 90] fact of kinship may have opened the way ”

“ The logical result of such experiments is scientific imitation rather than Art, and, though a longer life might have enabled Constable to become even more modern than he is, it is doubtful whether he would have added to his fame as an artist.
The actual scope of his achievement is already wide enough. In early life his aim had been to find out how far the cool fresh colours of the skies and streams and fields and trees of his beloved Suffolk could be suggested within the then accepted limits of oil-painting. ”

“ During the existence of the republic he was elected member of the first, second, and fourth councils of state, and twice was appointed president of the fourth council. He died on 5 June 1655 in London, and was interred in Henry VII’s Chapel in Westminster Abbey on 21 June (Mercurius Politicus) . His wife, Lady Dorothy Constable, died on 9 March following, and was buried on 11 March 1656 at Bishophill Elder, Yorkshire (Foster) . At the Restoration Constable was one of the twenty-one dead regicides whose estates parliament resolved to confiscate (1 July) , and on 14 Sept. ”

“ As already indicated, the mature art of Constable did not develop till after the year 1811, when he began to combine the fresh colour of nature, which he had learned to depict by working in the open air, with the art of making a picture, which he had learned from painting portraits and copying those of other masters. ”

“ There was no firm in the city more prominent than Constable, Glenning and Hertzog, and none more highly esteemed. Possibly Mr. Constable emphasised this a little too often, but perhaps his insistence impressed some of the very people who pretended to laugh at it. “A firm of our standing,” was another of his pet phrases, and on this he rang the [Pg 81] changes with such genuine pride that those who did not envy readily forgave him the touch of conceit. ”

“ It is little more than a feeble imitation of West's religious works, and shows that at the age of twenty-eight Constable was quite unable to paint a figure subject decently. Yet, if the little picture in the National Gallery, On Barnes Common, belongs to this period, as its Dutch technique would suggest, the artist was already showing in what direction his talent really lay. Constable is still a student, and a student of the old masters, but he has learned something about traditional methods of work. ”

“ From 1806 to 1809 Constable was frequently engaged in painting portraits or in copying portraits by Reynolds and Hoppner. The effect on his landscape was great. He learned how to construct an oil painting, and the efforts of the next few years were devoted to combining this knowledge with his innate love of the fresh colour of nature. ”

“ The crowds of visitors that flocked to his baronial mansion at Abbotsford, from all quarters, greatly added to the expenses which the hospitable owner had to meet; but the unbounded popularity of his novels appeared to him and to his publishers a never-failing source of funds; and the Messrs. Constable accepted his drafts, to the amount of many thousand pounds, in favor of works which were not only unwritten, but even unimagined. ”

“ For many years he was priest at Swinnerton in Staffordshire, the residence of the Fitzherbert family. He was also declared rector of the jesuit ‘college’ or district of St. Chad on 16 July 1735 (Foley, Records, vii. 159) . In the parish register of Swinnerton is this entry:—‘1743–4, March 28, buried Mr. John Constable, from Mr. Fitzherbert's’ (ib. iii. 207) . In Oliver's opinion Constable is unquestionably entitled to rank among the ablest and best informed men in the English province. ”

“ Condé followed, and, having been reinforced, occupied Saint-Denis and proceeded, with astonishing daring, to blockade Paris, although his army does not seem to have exceeded 6000 men and he was without a single piece of artillery; while the Constable, with a vastly superior force, lay within the city. ”

“ Scott had said that Constable was as 'firm as Ben Lomond.' What he took for solid rock really rested upon rotten foundations.
That Scott should have felt this implicit confidence is sufficiently explicable. When the publishing business collapsed Constable had come to his help; and in a short time the former rival had become a close ally. They had a genuine regard for each other. Although their alliance did not imply purely altruistic motives, their interests were identical. Constable saw in Scott's writings the best of all his speculations. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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. ”

“ As a young man Constable certainly may not have been rich, but he was never reduced to any desperate straits, and later by various bequests inherited nearly £30,000. If his art was too original to command the ready sale which attends the commercial painter who has learned to paint down to the level of the public, he was at least admired and respected by a fair number of his brother-artists, he was a regular exhibitor at the Academy, and his success on the Continent was sufficiently spontaneous and remarkable to have satisfied any ambition. ”

“ Marmaduke Constable, son of Sir Robert Constable of Flamborough, and Agnes, daughter of Sir Philip Wentworth of Suffolk, was the eldest of a family of eleven, five sons and six daughters. His epitaph says his age was seventy at Brankiston (i.e. Flodden) Field in 1513. ”

“ Condé could not contain his indignation. “The Prince de Condé has left the Court in anger,” runs a letter from Fontainebleau, “because they (Charles IX. and Catherine) would not give the daughter of the late Maréchal de Saint-André to his son. He believes that they intend to give her to Guise. The Constable has gone to fetch him back. Others have gone to fan the flame.” [49] But it appears to have been Mlle. de Limeuil, and not the Constable, who persuaded the prince to stomach the affront he had received and to return to the Court. ”

“ The death of the Duc de Guise paved the way for peace; and, through the intervention of Catherine and the Princesse de Condé, it was arranged that the prince and the Constable should meet and discuss its conditions. On March 7, two barges, the first coming from Orléans, the second from the opposite bank of the Loire, arrived at the Île-aux-Bœufs, situated a little below the town. In one was the Constable, under the care of his nephew, Andelot; in the other, Condé, under that of Damville. ”

“ His tastes, however, were rather literary than legal. In 1798 he made acquaintance with Archibald Constable [q. v.] , who then kept a bookshop, and was just setting up as a publisher. They formed a close friendship, which lasted till Constable's death. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In a sketch unity can easily be obtained by devices that are impossible in large pictures, where the composition has to be built up by elaborate machinery. Feeling that he could not as yet control this machinery, Constable set himself to learn its secrets by returning to the study of Reynolds and others of the old masters. His experiments in landscape were for a time confined to modest proportions, and he did not begin to paint on a large scale until he had assured himself of the soundness of his principles of work. ”

“ Colin Mackenzie entered, and with his usual kindness engages to use his influence to recommend some moderate proceeding to Constable's creditors, such as may permit him to go on and turn that species of property to account, which no man alive can manage so well as he.
Followed Mr. Gibson with a most melancholy tale. Things are so much worse with Constable than I apprehended that I shall neither save Abbotsford nor anything else. Naked we entered the world, and naked we leave it—blessed be the name of the Lord! ”