"For the last two years I have been running after pictures, and seeking the truth at second hand ... I shall return to Bergholt, where I shall endeavour to get a pure and unaffected manner of representing the scenes that may employ me ... There is room for a natural painter. The great vice of the day is bravura, an attempt to do something beyond the truth."
Constable had now thirty-five years of life before him, through which he worked unwearyingly, joyfully, to become a natural painter. Henceforth he was the interpreter of English "cultivated scenery"—pastures and the skies, trees and cottages, the farm-hand, the farm-waggon, the farm-horse, the fugitive rain and the wind that passes. Mountains, the sea, the piled up majestic picturesqueness of Nature did not attract him. In brain, heart, and vision he was essential pastoral England, and never did he better express his innermost feeling than when he wrote:
"I love every stile and stump and lane in the village; as long as I am able to hold a brush, I shall never cease to paint them."
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; in 1816, at forty, he married; in 1819, at forty-three, he was elected A.R.A.; in 1824, his "Hay Wain" was exhibited at the Salon; in 1828 his wife died; in 1829, at fifty-three, he was elected R.A., and in 1837 he died. The end was sudden. He had been at work during the day on his last picture of "Arundel Mill and Castle," and although his friends noticed that he was not looking well, he was able to go out that evening on an errand connected with the Artists' Benevolent Fund. He retired to bed about nine o'clock, read as was his custom, and when the servant removed the candle by which he had been reading, he was asleep. Later he awoke in great pain, and died within an hour. The post-mortem revealed no indications of disease, and the extreme pain, says Leslie, from which Constable suffered and died could only be traced to indigestion. The vault in the south-east corner of the churchyard at Hampstead where his wife had been buried, and from the shock of whose death he never quite recovered, was opened, and he was laid by her side.
His art was sane and healthy, but his letters show that during the latter part of his life he suffered from depression and morbid fancies.
"All my indispositions," he wrote to Fisher, "have their source in my mind. It is when I am restless and unhappy that I become susceptible of cold, damp, heats, and such nonsense." And, to sum up, Leslie recalls a passage written by Constable ten years before his death, in which, after speaking of having removed his family to Hampstead, he says: "I could gladly exclaim, here let me take my everlasting rest."
But his life was an extremely happy one on the whole; the legacies he received, placed him in comfortable circumstances, and if, outside his own fraternity, his art was but little encouraged, that was the lot of all landscape painters. It is said that he was nearly forty before he sold a landscape beyond the circle of his relatives and personal friends. This was probably the "Ploughing Scene in Suffolk," bought from the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1814 by Mr Allnutt. But to set against this tardy recognition, there was the splendour of the acknowledgments that came later—his gold medal at the 1824 Salon, and the gold medal at Lille in 1825 for his "White Horse." The priced catalogue of the sale of his pictures and sketches after his death shows how enormously the appreciation of Constable has increased. The two magnificent studies for "The Hay Wain" and "The Leaping Horse" now at the Victoria and Albert Museum, were sold in one lot for fourteen pounds ten shillings; "Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop's Garden," went for sixty-four pounds one shilling, and "The Opening of Waterloo Bridge" for sixty-three pounds.
Constable fell under the ban of Ruskin—unjustly, "I have never seen any work of his in which there were signs of his being able to draw" is the opening of an oft-quoted passage; but when Modern Painters was being written, as Mr Sturge Henderson points out, the magnificent collection of Constable's tree studies and sketches, now at South Kensington, were still in private hands. Ruskin could never have taunted Constable with not being able to draw had he examined those studies. Although not a great draughtsman he was certainly a conscientious, competent, and life-long student of drawing.
Constable has now his assured high place in British art. So valuable have his paintings become, that he has long been a prey to the forger and the clever copyist. Mr C. J. Holmes, in his exhaustive and discriminating work on Constable, devotes four pages to an examination of the methods of the forgers. In another appendix he prints a chronological list of Constable's chief pictures and sketches, from 1795, the year of his earliest dated work, "A Study after Claude," to the "Arundel Mill and Castle," exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1837. At the beginning of the record of each year's work there is a line giving the "Places Visited" by Constable during the year. These bare records are like so many windows opening to the country places which Constable loved, where he spent joyous, enthusiastic days; for Constable was never so happy as when he stood with brushes and palette face to face with Nature. Turner was a world traveller—the world of Europe. Constable was a home traveller—the homely stiles, stumps, and lanes of the village. What a vista the following mere record of the Places Visited in 1823 gives: London, Southgate, Suffolk, Salisbury, Gillingham, Sherbourne, Fonthill, Cole-Orton. Can you not see him drawing from each place fresh and dewy inspiration? Not "truth at second-hand": truth direct from the source. And does not the heart respond to Constable's generous enthusiasm for his great contemporary. Here is his testimony to Turner's contributions to the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1828:
"Turner has some golden visions, glorious and beautiful. They are only visions, but still, they are art, and one could live and die with such pictures."