Probably the greatest surprise, and certainly one of the most comforting episodes of his life, was the receipt of a legacy of twenty thousand pounds on the death of his wife's father, which elicited the remark that now he could "stand before a six-foot canvas with a mind at ease, thank God!"
Constable developed slowly as a painter, but having once found himself he strode steadily onward, knowing exactly what he meant to do, turning neither to the right nor to the left, indifferent to tradition, schools, and influences. Consequently the earlier years of his life, when he was breaking away from tradition and beginning to see things with his own eyes are the more interesting. He was born at East Bergholt in Suffolk on 11th June 1776, the second son of Golding Constable, owner of water and wind mills. At the Dedham Grammar School he was renowned for his penmanship, and before he left school, at seventeen years of age, he had already shown a strong inclination towards painting. In this he was encouraged by his friend John Dunthorne, plumber and glazier, a man of parts, who devoted his leisure time to landscape painting.
Fate was complaisant to Constable. Born in an opulent and wooded quarter of Suffolk, on a spot overlooking the fertile valley of the Stour, with a friend close at hand who loved Nature and painted her for pleasure not for profit, can we wonder that, later in life, Constable wrote enthusiastically and gratefully of "the scenes of my boyhood which made me a painter." A painter he was from the beginning, for his father's proposal that he should take Orders was never really seriously entertained, and the year that he spent as a miller was surely of more service to him as a student of Nature than if he had spent the period as a student in an art school. As a miller, the "handsome miller" he was called, he learnt at first hand the ways of winds, clouds, and storms; in an art school he would have learned how his predecessors had decided that antique statues should be drawn and "shaded." Yes; everything conspired to make John Constable "a natural painter." The art schools would serve him later, but that year as a miller watching the skies, noting the winds, observing the growth of crops, and the demeanour of trees, was the foundation of his originality. He was but sixteen—that impressionable period when everything is new, and the eyes of body and soul absorb and retain. In that fresh and impulsive sketch called "Spring," now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, he painted, later in life, one of the mills in which he worked, upon the timbers of which he had carved the words "John Constable, 1792." In the second edition of his "Life," published in 1845, Leslie says that the name and date, neatly carved with a penknife, "still remain." Leslie also prints Constable's description of this "Spring" sketch which was engraved by David Lucas.
"It may perhaps give some idea of one of those bright silvery days in the spring, when at noon large garish clouds surcharged with hail or sleet sweep with their broad shadows the fields, woods, and hills; and by their depths enhance the value of the vivid greens and yellows so peculiar to the season. The natural history, if the expression may be used, of the skies, which are so particularly marked in the hail squalls at this time of the year, is this...." Then follows a lengthy and intimate study of the natural history of the skies, showing what stores of knowledge he had amassed during the year he worked as a miller. Is it exaggeration to describe that year as the most important of his life. It gave him the independent outlook, the rough intimacy with fields and hedgerows under the influences of light and weather, that new-old knowledge which so astonished the French artists at the Salon of 1824. Constable began with the skies of Nature, he went on to study the skies of Claude, Ruysdael, and other masters; but he returned to the skies and pastures of Nature, never to leave them again.
PLATE V.—DEDHAM MILL. Victoria and Albert Museum.
Painted in 1820, three years after "Flatford Mill." Constable's father was the owner of the watermills at Flatford and Dedham. Many years before the date of this picture, Constable, writing of a landscape of Dedham by an acquaintance, said—"It is very well painted, and there is plenty of light without any light at all." In "Dedham Mill," he progresses in his purpose to infuse true light into his pictures.
