PLATE III.—THE CORNFIELD, OR COUNTRY LANE.
Sir George having placed a small landscape by Gaspar Poussin on his easel, close to a picture he was painting, said, "Now, if I can match these tints I am sure to be right."
"But suppose," replied Constable, "Gaspar could rise from his grave, do you think he would know his own picture in its present state? or if he did, should we not find it difficult to persuade him that somebody had not smeared tar or cart grease over its surface, and then wiped it imperfectly off?"
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. 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 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. And in truth those pioneers suffered for their temerity. Wilson, who never quite cast off the classical mantle, accepted with gratitude, at the height of his fame, the post of librarian to the Royal Academy. Gainsborough would have starved had he been obliged to depend upon landscape painting for a living, and Constable would have been in financial straits had he been obliged to depend for the support of his family entirely upon the sale of his pictures.
Wilson died in 1782, Gainsborough in 1788, and J. R. Cozens, whom Constable described as "the greatest genius who ever touched landscape," in 1799; but the careers of these men cannot be said to have influenced their landscape contemporaries. While Wilson, Gainsborough, and Cozens were still alive, certain boys were growing up in England, who were destined to make the nineteenth century splendid with their landscape performances. What a galaxy of names! Old Crome and James Ward were born in 1769; Turner and Girtin in 1775; Constable in 1776. Cotman saw the light in 1782, the year of Wilson's death; David Cox in 1783; Peter de Wint in 1784, and the short and brilliant life of Bonington began in 1801. But landscape painting was still, and was to remain for long, the Cinderella of the arts. In 1829 Cotman wrote a letter beginning, "My eldest son is following the same miserable profession."
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 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. There was Paul Huet and there was Georges Michel, happy no doubt in their work, but unfortunate in living before their time. Michel, neglected, misunderstood, was excluded from the Salon exhibitions after 1814, on account of his revolutionary tendencies. We note signs of the brown tree obsession in Michel's spacious and simple landscapes, but he painted the environs of Paris, and did not give a thought to theatrical renderings of Plutarch, Theocritus, Ovid, or Virgil.
France was ripe for Constable at that memorable Salon of 1824, simple, straight-seeing Constable, who painted his Suffolk parish, not the tumbling ruins of Italy, and who showed that "the sun shines, that the wind blows, that water wets, and that air and light are everywhere." But Constable's influence on the French painters, although great, must not be overstated. Change was in the air. Herald signs had not been lacking of the rebirth of French landscape painting. The French critics of the Salons had already begun to complain of the stereotyped classical ruins and brown-tree landscapes; they announced that they were weary of "malarious lakes, desolate wastes, and terrible cliffs." Joyfully they welcomed in the Salon of 1822 the brilliant water-colours of Bonington, Copley Fielding, and other Englishmen, and then came 1824 with Constable showing that the bright, fresh colours were also possible in oil, and that a fine picture could be made out of an "unpicturesque locality," a lock, a cottage, a hay-wain, a cornfield, quite as well as from a "Plague among the Philistines at Ashdod," or an "Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba."
As has been already explained, Constable did not dream of the success and fame that was in store for him in Paris. "The Hay Wain" was painted in 1821; he was then forty-five, and as will be seen from the following letter written in 1822, he had not found art remunerative.
"I have some nibbles at my large picture of 'The Hay Wain' in the British Gallery. I have an offer of seventy pounds without the frame to form part of an exhibition in Paris. I hardly know what to do. It might promote my fame and procure me commissions, but it is the property of my family; though I want money dreadfully; and, on this subject, I must beg a great favour of you, indeed, I can do it of no other person. The loan of twenty pounds or thirty pounds would be of the greatest use to me at this time, as painting these large pictures has much impoverished me."
In 1824 the nibble became a bite. "The Hay Wain" with the two other pictures was sold "to a Frenchman" for two hundred and fifty pounds. The Frenchman's object was to make a show of them in Paris. He did so to some purpose. And it is odd to note that the name of this farseeing Frenchman has never been disclosed.
Above "The Hay Wain" in the National Gallery hangs James Ward's fine picture called "View of Harlech Castle and surrounding landscape." That is the official title, but I suggest that the title should be, "The End of the Brown Tree." You will observe that the brown tree has been cut down and is being hurried away in a cart drawn by four grey horses. I do not accuse the Director of the National Gallery of joking; but I cannot think it was altogether without intention that, in the rehanging of the room, James Ward's allegory of the end of the Brown Tree should have been hung above Constable's "Hay Wain," the pioneer picture of the new movement.