Well Walk.
In 1830 Well Walk received another memorable tenant in Constable, the painter, who from his first coming to London had known and loved Hampstead. Immediately after leaving the mills and streams of Berghold, we find him passing whole days upon the Heath, and, with all a poet’s ineffable love of Nature, making his fairest transcripts of her at his ‘Sweet Hampstead’—an endless treasury to him for all the purposes of his art. After his marriage he had been in the habit of spending a portion of the summer months here with his wife and children, always with the same result, ‘no illness amongst them.’ But this year (1830), instead of returning to the old lodgings at No. 2, Lower Terrace, he rented a house in Well Walk, from which in the August of the same year I find him writing to his friend Leslie:
‘Will this weather tempt you to walk over the fields to my pretty dwelling in Well Walk?’
In the next year (1831) I think it is quite clear that, for some reason or other, he gave up this house in favour of a larger and better situated one, else why should he write thus to his friend Dean Fisher?—
‘This house is to my wife’s heart’s content.... It is situated on an eminence at the back of the spot in which you saw us’ (Well Walk), ‘and our little drawing-room commands a view unsurpassed in Europe, from Westminster Abbey to Gravesend. The dome of St. Paul’s in the air seems to realize Michael Angelo’s words on seeing the Pantheon, “I will build such a thing in the sky.”’
‘We see the woods and lofty grounds of the East Saxons to the north-east.’
The Well Walk then extended some distance, but in a straight line and on level ground. Dean Fisher says the house he visited was at the bottom of the walk, and Constable himself that the one he is writing of was on an eminence. I imagine that it must have stood on the same side of the way as the Long Room, but beyond the walk, on the slope of the rising ground about Christchurch, where at that time of open spaces such a view was possible. I remember an old and respected inhabitant of Hampstead High Street telling me in 1859 that thirty years previous you could see from what he called ‘Perrin’s Corner’ Erith Reach, and the ships sailing up and down the Thames, while the back-windows of his house looked over open fields to Pancras. The house we are in quest of was rented at £52 per annum, and £24 taxes—not an unimportant house in those days—yet when William Howitt wrote his ‘Northern Heights of London’ there was no house in Well Walk possessing such a view as Constable had described; nor could he,[273] though not much more than thirty years had passed since the delightful painter of the ‘Cornfield, a View near Hampstead,’ and the ‘Fir-tree Avenue on the Heath,’ had resided in the vicinity, discover his sometime abode.
Here the artist lost his beloved and loving wife, and wrote in his diary under the date of her death, ‘I shall now call Hampstead home.’
Whereabouts, I wonder, stood that elegant group of trees, ashes, elms and oaks, of which he made a study, and that were to be of as much service to him as if he had bought the field in which they grew? But his sketch-books were full of the likenesses of the sylvan beauties of the Heath and its neighbourhood—the beautiful trees that, like the clouds, seemed to ask him to do something like them. Perhaps those in the grounds of Mr. Charles Holford, of which he made a sketch, may still be flourishing.