East Bergholt—The Valley of the Stour—Painting from nature—East Anglian girls.
Charles Kingsley was wont to glorify the teaching of the hills, and to maintain that the man of the mountain is more imaginative and poetical than the man of the plain. There are many Scotch people, mostly those born in the Highlands, who tell us much the same. If the theory be true—and I am not aware that it is—the exceptions are striking and many. Lincolnshire is rather a flat country, but it gave us (I can never bring myself to call him Lord) Alfred Tennyson. Many of our greatest poets and artists were cockneys; and Constable, that sweet painter of cornfields and shady lanes and quiet rivers, used to say that the scenes of his boyhood made him a painter. I was one autumn in Constable’s county, and I do not wonder at it. It is a wonderful district. I
trod all the while, it seemed to me, on enchanted ground: in the gilded mist of autumn, with its river and its marsh lands, where the cows lazily fed—or got under the pollards to be out of the way of the flies—where laughing children swarmed along the hedges in pursuit of the ripe blackberry, where every cottage front was a thing of beauty, with its ivy creeping up the roof or over the wall; while the little garden was a mass of flowers. We expected to see the old gods and goddesses again to participate in the joyousness of an ancient mirth.
Nor was it altogether a flat land, sacred to fat cattle and wheat and turnips. All round me were the elements of romance. At one end of the Vale of Dedham is a hill whence you may look all along the valley (Constable has made it the subject of one of his pictures) as far as Harwich; and as I lingered by the Stour—the river which divides Essex and Suffolk—East Bergholt, clothed with woods and crowned with a church, in which there is a stained-glass window put up in honour of Constable, and a baptismal font, the gift of Constable’s brother, unfolded to my wondering eye all her rural charms. There are people who love to climb hills; I hate to do so. It is all vanity and
vexation of spirit; when you get to the top of one hill the chances are all you see is another hill, to the top of which you will have to climb. Give me a country lane, with its luxuriant hedges, its shady trees, its flowers, its richness of greensward, its pigs and poultry and farmyard; there is poetry in such nooks and corners of the earth, as Burns and Bloomfield and Gerald Massey found. No wonder the place made Constable an artist, and an artist whose name will not speedily pass away. My dear sir or madam, the next time you are on your way from London to Ipswich, don’t rush along at express speed; get out at Ardleigh, make your way to the Vale of Dedham, then walk along the Stour, and cross it by a couple of rustic bridges, and you are at East Bergholt, in Suffolk, where Constable was born, and if you do so you will bless me evermore. Then, if you like, rejoin the train at Manningtree, and resume your journey. Few East Anglians even are aware of the wealth of beauty in that quiet corner. ‘The beauty of the surrounding scenery,’ writes Constable’s biographer, ‘its gentle declivities, its luxuriant meadows, flats sprinkled with flocks and herds, its well-cultivated Uplands, its woods and rivers, with mansions scattered, and churches, farms, and picturesque
cottages—all impart to this spot an amenity and elegance hardly anywhere else to be found.’
The Constables have been long in the district. The grandfather was a farmer at a village close by. The father, who was well-to-do, purchased a water-mill at Dedham and two windmills at East Bergholt, where he lived. The great artist, his son John, was born in the last century, and was educated at Lavenham and the Dedham Grammar School, and when the lad had reached sixteen or seventeen became addicted to painting, his studio being in the house of a Mr. John Dunthorne, a painter and glazier, with whom he remained on terms of the greatest intimacy for many years. The father would fain have made the son a farmer. He preferred to be a miller, and in his young days was known in the district as the handsome miller. His windmills, when he took to painting, were wonderful, and well deserved the criticism of his brother, who used to say, ‘When I look at a windmill painted by John, I see that it will go round, which is not always the case with those of other artists,’ for the simple reason that John knew what he was about, which the others did not. Again, his industrial career helped him in another way. A miller learns to study the clouds, and Constable’s
clouds were exceptionally life-like and real. The handsome young miller soon acquired artistic friends, one of them being Sir George Beaumont, the guide, philosopher, and friend of most of the geniuses of that time. Said another to him, ‘Do not trouble yourself about inventing figures for a landscape; you cannot remain an hour in a spot without the appearance of some living thing, that will in all probability better accord with the scene and the time of day than any invention of your own.’ After a visit to his artist friends in London, he resumed his mill life, and in 1779 he finally commenced his artistic career, and painted all the country round. His studies were chiefly Dedham, East Bergholt, the Valley of the Stour, and the neighbouring village of Stratford. At Stoke Nayland he painted an altar-piece for the church. There is also another altar-piece in a neighbouring church, but his altar-pieces are not known or treasured like his other works.
Cooper tells a good story of Constable. One day Stodart, the sculptor, met Fuseli starting forth with an old umbrella. ‘Why do you carry the umbrella?’ asked the sculptor. ‘I am going to see Constable,’ was the reply, ‘and he is always painting rain.’ One can only remark that, if