PLATE VI.—A COUNTRY LANE. National Gallery.
This sketch probably served as the motive for the picture of "The Cornfield." The sobriety of the work places it in a category between the careful construction of the Exhibition pictures and the impetuosity of most of the sketches.
PLATE VI.—A COUNTRY LANE.PLATE VI.—A COUNTRY LANE.
PLATE VI.—A COUNTRY LANE.PLATE VI.—A COUNTRY LANE.
Constable exhibited one hundred and four works at the Royal Academy. In addition to these and other paintings, he produced many brilliant sketches and a number of drawings. Like Turner, his achievements may be exhaustively studied in public Exhibitions in London, and as with Turner, the difficulty is where to begin. At the National Gallery there is a wall composed, with one exception, entirely of his works; the Victoria and Albert Museum contains a room, or rather a hall of his pictures, sketches, and studies, and he is also represented at the Tate and Diploma Galleries. Some of the examples were bequeathed to the nation by his last surviving daughter, Miss Isabel Constable, in 1888. Two years later Henry Vaughan bequeathed a number of works, including "The Hay Wain."
The casual visitor finds little emotional excitement, and no literary interest in these honest interpretations of English scenery. 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. Once he said that "painting is another word for feeling," but he also made that most characteristic retort to Blake, who, when looking through one of Constable's sketch-books, exclaimed on seeing a drawing of fir-trees on Hampstead Heath—"Why, this is not drawing, but inspiration." To which Constable quietly replied—"I meant it for drawing."
Constable never desired to thrill; his ambition was merely to be a natural painter, and he would probably not have been in the least distressed at the episode related by Mr Sturge Henderson in his biography. An elegant and attractive American woman after examining "The Glebe Farm" in the National Gallery, remarked to her son, a typical undergraduate: "Does this thrill you?" "Not the least in the world," replied the son, and they passed on. 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. His breezy and showery effects, blowing wind, rustling grasses, waving trees, and wet rain, were occasionally the subjects of banter from his fellow Academicians and others. Fuseli, Professor of Painting, a bad artist, but a good joker, was once seen to open his umbrella as he entered the Exhibition.
"What are you doing with your umbrella up?" asked a friend.
"Oh," replied Fuseli, "I am going to look at Mr Constable's pictures!"
That was really a great compliment, and I may cap the story by quoting the brief, bald, criticism of Sir William Beechy on Constable's "Salisbury from the Meadows."
"Why, d—n it, Constable, what a d——d fine picture you are making; but you look d——d ill, and you have got a d——d bad cold."
No. Constable of the "unpicturesque localities" does not thrill, and his pictures evoke a meditative rather than an ecstatic mood. In his large works one never finds the haunting charm of a fine Corot, the majesty of a Rousseau, or the clarity of light and colour of a Harpigny. He did not, except in rare cases, select from the abundance of Nature; he was content with facts as he saw them, and he laboured at his surfaces until sometimes one can hardly disentangle the incidents for the paint in which they are enveloped. "The Leaping Horse," in the Diploma Gallery, is a magnificent performance in picture-making but it is heavy—heavy as a mid-day English Sunday dinner. It has force, strength, knowledge, vigour, but little beauty, except perhaps in the sweep of sky; and certainly no strangeness. The signs of labour are written all over it; you feel that he has carefully and conscientiously composed this picture for an exhibition, and that in the long labour he has lost the early impulse and freshness of thepensée mère. To see how much he lost you have only to study the large sketch for "The Leaping Horse," in the Victoria and Albert Museum, finer, bolder, much more instinct with life and inspiration than the finished production. Which brings me to the two great divisions of Constable's life-work—the sketches, which we are told he did not regard as "serious," and the finished pictures.
His sketches are innumerable, and all, or at any rate the great majority of them possess the impulse, the lyrical note, so often lacking in his larger canvases. Of course, this criticism applies to all painters. The sketch is made for love, the picture for an Exhibition. What could be more luminously spacious, unworried and unfettered by the convention of picture-making than his small oil-sketch of "Harwich: Sea and Lighthouse," in the Tate Gallery, of which there is a pencil sketch at South Kensington, dated 1815. Here is the first impression caught and transferred to canvas while the blood was still hot, the pulse quick, and the eyes eager to record this scene of desolate beauty, vast sky, rippling ocean, bare foreshore, lonely lighthouse, and one figure in the foreground, with notes of almost indistinguishable figures beyond the lighthouse, and a few remote sails upon the sea. 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. They induce, they compel one to linger in such places as the dark staircase of the Diploma Gallery, in Burlington House, the walls of which sing out with two groups of his sketches, significant moments seen in Nature. That beach and sea; the rain-storm streaming down the canvas; those floating clouds, only the clouds and the sky visible; that boat with the red sail labouring in the heavy water—they are essential Constable. And what an object lesson in the making of a landscape painter is provided by the hall of drawings, pictures, and sketches at the Victoria and Albert Museum. They are a standing refutation of Ruskin's words—"I have never seen any work of his in which there were signs of his being able to draw, and hence the most necessary details are painted by him insufficiently." Constable was not an inspired draughtsman; but that he worked hard at drawing, and that he achieved considerable mastery with his pencil is abundantly testified by the many examples at South Kensington, notably, "The Study of Trees at Hampstead," the "Windsor Castle from the River," the "Cart and Horses," and above all the magnificent and minute "Stem of an Elm Tree," none of which, as has already been noted, Ruskin had ever seen. These are all interesting, almost meticulously conscientious, but for John Constable in more daring mood, carried away by the riot of the scene, we must turn to such sketches as the chaotic cloud forms of "Weymouth Bay," and the splashy, opulent splendour of the oil sketch called "View on the Stour." Or to the sketches that emerge, modestly but clamantly, from the large works on the wall devoted to his achievement at the National Gallery, which contains no fewer than twenty-two examples by Constable. One of them, "A Country Lane," illustrated in these pages, served as a motive for his picture of "The Cornfield." The sobriety and somewhat heavy handling of this oil sketch places it in a category between the careful construction of the Exhibition pictures, and the impetuosity of most of the sketches. But the atmospheric "Salisbury" that hangs below, to the left of "A Country Lane," which is a preliminary study without the rainbow for the picture of "Salisbury from the Meadows," has all the quick, almost feverish informality of his best sketches. It is larger than the sketches, but shows no anxiety. The hand following the eye stopped when the vision of the eye was recorded, when all the hurry of the wet glitter of the scene had been stated in broken pigment. As a contrast, examine "A Cornfield with Figures," a tranquilly beautiful suggestion of late summer—fifteen and a half inches by nine and a half—thinly painted rain-clouds floating past, the heat haze hovering in the field of corn partly reaped and stocked. The vivid, "Summer Afternoon after a Shower," hanging near by has an interest apart from its spontaneity and vigour. It is precisely what it looks, the recollection of a summer shower, noted in an ecstatic moment, and recorded at a sitting. The story is told by Leslie—how Constable was travelling by coach either to or from Brighton; how at Redhill he saw this effect; how he treasured the memory of it until the coach reached its destination, and how "immediately on alighting," he made this sketch of one wild moment snatched from Nature.
PLATE VII.—SALISBURY CATHEDRAL FROM THE BISHOP'S GARDEN.
Victoria and Albert Museum.
In the interval between the painting of "The Hay Wain" (1821) and its exhibition in Paris (1824), Constable produced "Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop's Garden," wherein he attempted to represent the glitter of sunlight by spots of pure pigment, which his friends called "Constable's snow."
PLATE VII.—SALISBURY CATHEDRAL FROM THE BISHOP'S GARDEN.PLATE VII.—SALISBURY CATHEDRAL FROM THE BISHOP'S GARDEN.
PLATE VII.—SALISBURY CATHEDRAL FROM THE BISHOP'S GARDEN.PLATE VII.—SALISBURY CATHEDRAL FROM THE BISHOP'S GARDEN.
It was this constant study of Nature that distinguished Constable from those of his academic predecessors and contemporaries who studied only the works of other painters. It was in this solitary communion with Nature that Constable showed the originality of his genius. How thorough he was. He was not content to note only what his eyes saw, but he also observed and recorded the time of day and the direction of the wind.
"Twenty of Constable's studies of skies made during this season (1822) are in my possession," says Leslie, "and there is but one among them in which a vestige of landscape is introduced. They are painted in oil, on large sheets of thick paper, and all dated, with the time of day, the direction of the wind, and other memoranda on their backs. On one, for instance, is written:
'Fifth of September 1822. Ten o'clock morning, looking south-east, brisk wind at west. Very bright and fresh, grey clouds running fast over a yellow bed, about half-way in the sky.'"
That is the real Constable speaking, the Constable who had "found himself." But we are never wholly emancipated from tradition, and knowing the difficulties of his craft he retained his admiration for the great ones among his predecessors. In 1824, he wrote: "I looked into Angerstein's the other day; how paramount is Claude..."
Maybe. But Claude had to be left alone. Constable knew that in his heart, and, as he advanced in wisdom, art at second-hand held him less and less, and art at first hand, which is Nature, more and more. He learnt to rely upon his eyes and the cunning of his hand. And when he "thanked Heaven he had no imagination," there was more in that utterance than appears on the surface.
In one of his letters, dated 1799, Constable refers to "a sweet little picture by Jacob Ruysdael I am copying." He was then twenty-three years of age, a devoted admirer and student of his predecessors in landscape, and able, strange as it may seem to us, to call a Ruysdael sweet. In the style of the old masters he continued working until he was nearly forty, learning from them how to construct a picture, and "acquiring execution" as he expressed it. A methodical man was John Constable, a builder who spared no trouble to make his foundations sound; but during those years of spade work in his voluntary apprenticeship, he never disregarded his determination to become a natural painter. It was his custom to study and copy the old masters during his sojourn in London, but to paint in his own original way, directly from Nature and in the open air, when in the country. An early result of "being himself" during holiday time was the "Dedham Vale" oil sketch of 1802, now at South Kensington, a careful, reposeful picture with trees rising formally at the right, and the church tower visible just beyond the winding river. He utilised this sketch for the large picture exhibited, under the same title, in 1828. The influence of other painters such as the Dutch landscape men, Gainsborough and Girtin, may be traced in many of his pictures produced in the opening years of the nineteenth century when he was "acquiring the execution" on which he based his originality. He also painted portraits; indeed at one time he proposed to live by portrait painting. During 1807 and the next few years he produced several, notably Mr Charles Lloyd of Birmingham and his wife, which Mr C. J. Holmes describes as "amateurish and uncertain in drawing and execution." But there was nothing amateurish or uncertain about the "Portrait of a Boy," which I have lately seen, a ruddy country boy, clad in pretty town-like clothes, an honest, direct, rich piece of work, without a hint of affectation, just the vision of the eye set down straightforwardly. And the foxgloves that stand growing by the boy's right hand are painted as honestly as the striped pantaloons that this open-air boy wears. Just the kind of portrait that John Constable would have painted. He also produced two altarpieces—in 1804, a "Christ Blessing Little Children" at Brantham Church, Suffolk; and in 1809, a "Christ Blessing the Elements" at Nayland Church.
Eight years later, in 1817, he painted "Flatford Mill on the Stour," No. 1273 in the National Gallery, which forms one of our illustrations. Constable was then forty-one, a somewhat mature age for a man to produce what may fairly be called his first important picture. But all his past life had been a preparation for this photographic, pleasant transcript of English scenery. Nothing is left to the imagination, everything is stated, every inch of canvas is painted with equal force, yet what an advance it is upon most of the classical landscapes then in vogue. It is a picture of England, ripe, lush, carefully composed, carefully executed, but fresh as are the meadows on the banks of the Stour; and the sky across which the large clouds are drifting is sunny. This picture was bought in at the Constable sale, held the year after his death, in 1838, for the very modest sum of thirty-three guineas.
"The White Horse," called also "A Scene on the River Stour," exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1819, which is now in the possession of Mr Pierpont Morgan, was one of Constable's early successes. It attracted "more attention than anything he had before exhibited," and was bought for one hundred guineas, "exclusive of the frame," by Archdeacon Fisher, who wrote on 27th April:—"'The White Horse' has arrived; it is hung on a level with the eye, the frame resting on the ogee moulding in a western side light, right for the light in the picture. It looks magnificently." "The White Horse" realised one hundred and fifty guineas at the Constable sale, and in 1894, fifty-six years later, was bought by Messrs Agnew for six thousand two hundred guineas.
With "The White Horse" Constable also sent to the British Gallery a picture called "The Mill," which is supposed to be identical with the "Dedham Mill, Essex," at the Victoria and Albert Museum. 1819 was a successful year for Constable, a golden year. He was summoned to Bergholt to receive the four thousand pounds he had inherited from his father; in this year Mrs Constable also inherited four thousand pounds; and he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy. 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." There spoke the true landscape painter, the man of deep feeling, conscious that in his painting he was interpreting God's handiwork, and expressing in his chosen medium the miracle of growth, the eternal movement of Nature from birth to re-birth. When standing in that hall at the Victoria and Albert Museum devoted to his achievement—growth, growth, growth—from pencil sketch to completed picture, there are moments when those words of his seem uttered near to us.
"Dedham Mill" may look to our spoilt modern eyes a little tame, but detach yourself from the present, drift into harmony with the picture, and you may perhaps invoke the spirit of the dead man who saw temperate beauty in this scene of his boyhood, and who tried to state his love and gratitude laboriously with paint and brushes—poor tools to express the living light and life of Nature.
Two years later, in 1821, at the age of forty-five, he painted "The Hay Wain," to which I have referred at length in the opening chapter. Perhaps some day when the re-organisation of the National Collections is complete, it will be found possible to hang the brilliant full-sized sketch of "The Hay Wain" now at South Kensington alongside the finished picture in the National Gallery. In the rough magnificent sketch you will observe that he had already begun to use the palette-knife freely in putting on the colour, a practice to which he became more and more addicted.
PLATE VIII.—SALISBURY.
National Gallery.
A preliminary study, without the rainbow, for the large picture of "Salisbury from the Meadows," exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1831. It is larger than his usual sketches, but shows no anxiety. The hand following the eye stopped when the vision of the eye was recorded, when all the hurry of the wet glitter of the scene had been stated in broken pigment.
PLATE VIII.—SALISBURY.PLATE VIII.—SALISBURY.
PLATE VIII.—SALISBURY.PLATE VIII.—SALISBURY.
"The Hay Wain" established his fame; but Constable was not the man to sit down under success and repeat his triumphs in one particular method. 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. Pinturicchio, in his frescoes in the library of Siena Cathedral, experimented in pointillism, and you may trace it, too, in some of the pictures by Vermeer of Delft. "Salisbury from the Bishop's Garden" gave Constable considerable trouble. He was ill and his children were ill. "What with anxiety, watching, nursing, and my own indisposition, I have not see the face of my easel since Christmas, and it is not the least of my troubles that the good Bishop's picture is not yet fit to be seen." Later he describes "Salisbury from the Bishop's Garden" as "the most difficult subject in landscape I ever had upon my easel," adding that it "looks uncommonly well," and that "I have not flinched at the windows, buttresses, etc., but I have still kept to my grand organ colour, and have, as usual, made my escape in the evanescence of the Chiaroscuro."
"The Lock," another of his well-known pictures, was purchased from the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1824 by Mr Morrison for "one hundred and fifty guineas, including the frame." The superb oil sketch for "The Lock" was sold at Christie's in 1901 for nineteen hundred guineas. It is an upright picture of sunshine and gusty wind, and represents a lock-keeper opening the gates for the passage of a boat. "My 'Lock'" wrote Constable to Fisher, "is liked at the Academy, and indeed it forms a decided feature, and its light cannot be put out, because it is the light of Nature, the mother of all that is valuable in poetry, painting, or anything else where an appeal to the soul is required.... But my execution annoys most of them, and all the scholastic ones. 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.
"The Leaping Horse" of 1825, to which reference has already been made, called by some his "grandest painting," reposes in the Diploma Gallery at Burlington House. 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; for Constable the noonday glow, the still heat haze, seen between cool, dark trees, hovering over a field of ripe corn, as in "The Cornfield," painted when he was fifty—a typical Constable. Constable was pleased with "The Cornfield." Writing of it to Fisher he said: "It is not neglected in any part; the trees are more than usually studied, well defined as well as the stems; they are shaken by a pleasant and healthful breeze at noon
'While now a fresher galeSweeping with shadowy gusts the fields of corn....'"
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. 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.
The magnificent "Opening of Waterloo Bridge" which, to those who had not seen it in Sir Charles Tennant's collection, came as a revelation when shown at the Old Masters' Exhibition, gave Constable continuous trouble and anxiety. He was years over it, and "he indulged in the vagaries of the palette-knife to an excess." It was not understood: it was not liked. "Very unfinished, sir," was the comment of his friend, Thomas Stothard, R.A.; and, says Leslie, "the picture was generally pronounced a failure." This brilliant presentation of the King embarking at Whitehall stairs, the water dancing, the air fluttering with gay banners and the sails of bright and sumptuous barges, was hung next to a grey sea-piece by Turner, who promptly placed a bright spot of red lead in the foreground of his own grey picture. The vivacity of Constable's river fete lost something by that spot of vivid red. "Turner has been here and fired a gun," said Constable. The flash remained, although "in the last moments allowed for painting, Turner glazed the scarlet seal he had put upon his picture, and shaped it into a buoy." Considerable doubt has been thrown on Leslie's statement "that soon after Constable's death the picture was toned to the aristocratic taste of the period by a coat of blacking." The picture bears no trace of a coat of mourning.
In the somewhat solemn and simple "Valley Farm," painted in 1835, two years before his death, Constable returned to the scenes of his boyhood, to Willy Lett's house on the bank of the Stour. His hand and eye have lost something of their grip and freshness, but his purpose is as firm as ever. "I have preserved God Almighty's daylight," he wrote, "which is enjoyed by all mankind, excepting only the lovers of old dirty canvas, perished pictures at a thousand guineas each, cart grease, tar, and snuff of candle." The old Adam, you perceive, was still strong in him.
"The Cenotaph," now in the National Gallery, was exhibited in the Royal Academy of 1836—the subject being the cenotaph erected by Sir George Beaumont in memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds, a tribute of affection and respect. It is somewhat heavy in treatment. Did Constable, I wonder, realise that his work was nearly done? Was the uninspiriting "Cenotaph" in his mind when, in the autumn of this year, he wrote so generously about the pictures that his great contemporary was exhibiting:—"Turner has outdone himself; he seems to paint with tinted steam, so evanescent and so airy."
Constable's last work was "Arundel Mill and Castle," upon which he was engaged on the day of his death, 31st March 1837.
His pictures are familiar to many who have not seen all the originals, through David Lucas's mezzotints. The first series of twenty mezzotints was published in 1833 under the title, "Various Subjects of Landscape, characteristic of English Scenery, principally intended to display the Phenomena of the Chiar'oscuro of Nature." Constable devoted much attention to the enterprise during the remainder of his life, inspired to make it as fine as possible by the example of Claude's "Liber Veritatis" and Turner's "Liber Studiorum." But its "duration, its expense, its hopelessness of remuneration" oppressed him. "It harasses my days and disturbs my rest at nights" he wrote in 1831. Constable took things hardly, very hardly, after his wife's death in 1828.
The personality of Constable was not romantic. In writing of him one has no moods of wonderment or bafflement, and the pen is not tempted to flights of wonder or fancy. 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. Indeed the portraits of Constable might represent a prosperous and cultured banker, especially those of his later years, were it not for the full, observant eye that you feel surveys a wider domain than Lombard Street. Religious in the true sense, dutiful, humble before the mysteries of things; old-fashioned in the true sense, a lover and a quoter of good poetry and of the Bible, he had on occasion a sharp and shrewd tongue, but the sting was salved by the absolute sincerity of his intention. Leslie devotes considerable space to a record of Constable's opinions and sayings, many of which have been quoted in these pages. Of a certain contemporary he said—"More over-bearing meekness I never met with in any one man." Of his own pictures he said—"They will never be popular, for they have no handling. But I do not see any handling in Nature."
Here is a saying about his art which sums up the whole tendency of his life—"Whatever may be thought of my art, it is my own; and I would rather possess a freehold, though but a cottage, than live in a palace belonging to another." And here is his comment on the unintelligent connoisseurship of his time—"The old rubbish of art, the musty, commonplace, wretched pictures which gentlemen collect, hang up, and display to their friends, may be compared to Shakespeare's—
'Beggarly account of empty boxes,Alligators stuffed,' etc.
Nature is anything but this, either in poetry, painting, or in the fields."
The lectures on Landscape Painting that he delivered at the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street, at the Hampstead Assembly Rooms, and at Worcester were never written, although an abstract of the first was found among his papers. He spoke from brief notes and made much use of a number of copies and engravings affixed to the walls. The notes taken by Leslie and embodied in hisLife of Constableare the only record we have apart from the abstract of the first lecture. The belittlers of Claude should make a note of Constable's idolatry for him:—"In Claude's landscape all is lovely—all amiable—all is amenity and repose;—the calm sunshine of the heart. He carried landscape, indeed, to perfection, that is, human perfection." Constable selected four works as marking four memorable points in the history of landscape—Titian's "Peter Martyr," Poussin's "Deluge," Rubens' "Rainbow," and Rembrandt's "Mill." In the choice of the Rubens and the Rembrandt everybody must concur. As Constable never visited Italy he can only have known the "Peter Martyr" from engravings. It was destroyed by fire in 1867, but a copy exists at S. Giovanni Paolo in Venice. Constable had the courage of his opinions, and of all his opinions the most astonishing is his strong disapproval of a national collection of pictures. In 1822 he wrote—"should there be a National Gallery (which is talked of) there will be an end of the art in poor old England, and she will become, in all that relates to painting, as much a nonentity as every other country that has one. The reason is plain; the manufacturers of pictures are then made the criterions of perfection, instead of Nature."
As a lecturer Constable seems to have relied in a great measure on the inspiration of the moment. Leslie also records the charm of a most agreeable voice, although pitched somewhat too low, and the play of his very expressive countenance. 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. If I may be allowed to use a very solemn quotation, I would say most emphatically to the student—'Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth.'"
The plates are printed by BEMROSE & SONS, LTD., Derby and London
The text at the BALLANTYNE PRESS, Edinburgh
"MASTERPIECES IN COLOUR" SERIES
ARTIST. AUTHOR.VELAZQUEZ. S. L. Bensusan.REYNOLDS. S. L. Bensusan.TURNER. C. Lewis Hind.ROMNEY. C. Lewis Hind.GREUZE. Alys Eyre Macklin.BOTTICELLI. Henry E. Binns.ROSSETTI. Lucien Pissarro.BELLINI. George Hay.FRA ANGELICO. James Mason.REMBRANDT. Josef Israels.LEIGHTON. A. Lys Baldry.RAPHAEL. Paul G. Konody.HOLMAN HUNT. Mary E. Coleridge.TITIAN. S. L. Bensusan.MILLAIS. A. Lys Baldry.CARLO DOLCI. George Hay.GAINSBOROUGH. Max Rothschild.TINTORETTO. S. L. Bensusan.LUINI. James Mason.FRANZ HALS. Edgcumbe Staley.VAN DYCK. Percy M. Turner.LEONARDO DA VINCI. M. W. Brockwell.RUBENS. S. L. Bensusan.WHISTLER. T. Martin Wood.HOLBEIN. S. L. Bensusan.BURNE-JONES. A. Lys Baldry.VIGÉE LE BRUN. C. Haldane Macfall.CHARDIN. Paul G. Konody.FRAGONARD. C. Haldane Macfall.MEMLINC. W. H. J. & J. C. Weale.CONSTABLE. C. Lewis Hind.RAEBURN. James L. Caw.JOHN S. SARGENT. T. Martin Wood.LAWRENCE. S. L. Bensusan.DÜRER. H. E. A. Furst.MILLET. Percy M. Turner.WATTEAU. C. Lewis Hind.HOGARTH. C. Lewis Hind.MURILLO. S. L. Bensusan.WATTS. W. Loftus Hare.INGRES. A. J. Finberg.Others in Preparation.