In search of The Valley Farm
John Constable (1776–1837) and Willy Lott’s house

 

 

 

FG Notehelfer

 

 

Tracing the roots of The Valley Farm (Tate Britain, London, see Pl 63) presents us with a number of important insights into the progression of Constable’s ideas and the form that these ideas took within the context of his native Suffolk scenery. It can be said that no single landscape subject received greater attention during Constable’s painting career than the many views of Willy Lott’s House at Flatford that began with an oil sketch in 1802 and continued to fascinate him until his final depiction of the subject in 1835. For Constable the ‘hundred yards of the Valley Farm’ (the larger house occupied by Willy’s elder brother that was next to Willy Lott’s House), as he once described the scene to his painter friend William George Jennings,^[1] stood not only at the core of his East Bergholt identity, ‘the scenes that made me a painter’, but as the touchstone of his inner vision of nature and the world he sought to depict as a ‘natural painter’ in the 1810s and 1820s.^[2]

In exploring his depiction of this subject from the 1810s to the 1830s we see in Constable’s work not only his original ‘georgic’^[3] ideals in which man and nature coexisted with one another in productive harmony, but also his shifting vision from naturalism to the picturesque that marked the mid 1820s, and his essential expressionism of the 1830s. While the external world served as a major cause for these changes, Constable was also subject to a profound inner transformation that involved a shift from the romantic inspiration of his youth and early married life to the disappointment and alienation that enveloped him following his wife’s death in 1828 and his final years as a Royal Academician.

 

 

The illustrations are of works by John Constable (1776–1837) in oil on canvas, unless otherwise stated

1 Willy Lott’s House, c1802. 33.7 x 42.6 cm. Clark Art Institute, Williamstown MA

 

 

What is intriguing about Willy Lott’s House, and about the farmer ‘Old Billy Lott,’ as Constable later called him, is that during Constable’s lifetime this farmhouse changed very little, if at all (Pl 1). For Constable, Billy Lott and his house represented the stability of a world in which man and nature coexisted in a productive and harmonious relationship. It was this relationship which Constable hoped to capture in his paintings. Unfortunately, by the 1820s and 1830s the countryside in which Constable had grown up was rapidly changing. The industrial revolution, as even he was forced to admit, was rapidly transforming all aspects of English life. Even East Bergholt could not escape these influences. Under the circumstances it may be possible to see Constable’s quest to record a stable and productive countryside as an effort to preserve a dying vision. The painter as salvage ethnographer is an interesting concept that may well be applied to Constable. Willy Lott’s House can be seen as playing an important role in this quest. ‘Old Billy Lott’ may well have constituted the perfect icon that defied change for Constable.

Born in 1761, Lott was already fifteen when Constable was born in 1776. When Constable died in 1837, Lott was still living in his house where he resided until his death in 1849. Thus, Lott spanned all of Constable’s living years. His house, which it is recorded he left only four days in his 80 years, served as an equal icon of changelessness. ^[4] Under the circumstances it is easy to see how Constable came to regard this house and its occupant as a symbol of stability and security. For Constable it became the quintessential Suffolk scene. It is also possible to argue that what changed in Constable’s depiction of this scene was less the subject, than the Painter’s response to it and the world of which it was a part. Constable’s search for The Valley Farm was therefore not only a search for the secrets of nature, and man’s relationship to his environment, but an inner journey of discovery that had as much to do with the painter’s psychological development as it did with the external world. That search led not only to his greatest success, The Hay Wain of 1821, but also to his greatest failure, The Valley Farm of 1835.

Constable’s first painting of Willy Lott’s house was produced in 1802 (Reynolds I-P, 166, 02.13). This work shows the house through the trees from across the river Stour. It is an oil sketch now in a private collection and depicts the scene in a naturalistic manner showing the trees as being quite open, with the barn, later depicted in the White Horse, appearing behind them. The composition shows the house exposed on the southeast side with one branch of the nearest tree curving over it at the corner. The sky already includes a configuration of cumulus clouds suggesting summer weather that is echoed in later studies. The painting includes no human or animal forms. Constable appears to have abandoned this perspective in subsequent treatments of the subject as he moved his easel closer to the house.

For the next seven years we have no further studies of Willy Lott’s house. Then, in 1809, Constable produced a drawing of the house as it is viewed from across the mill stream (Reynolds I-P, 810, 09.79) (Pl 2). In this drawing he introduced the horse-drawn cart that would later appear in the Hay Wain. To the rear of the house there is a small shed, and on the bank, towards which the horses and wagon are moving, there is a form that may be an upside-down boat. The willow tree that would become a prominent part of later compositions is also depicted in a sketchy way. The water level, which varied a good deal depending on the flow directed through Flatford Mill, appears to have been moderately high, revealing a somewhat reduced shoreline (in comparison with that in The Hay Wain). For Constable, drawings of this type essentially served as visual notes made for subsequent consideration, but they often included elements that he continued to identify with a particular scene.

 

 

2 John Constable, Willy Lott’s House with a horse-drawn cart, 1809. Pencil, 9.5 x 13.5 cm. Private collection

 

 

3 Willy Lott’s House, c1810–11, 27.3 x 24.2 cm (Reynolds 921 (11.36). Victoria and Albert Museum, London

 

 

 

 

4 David Lucas after John Constable, Willy Lott’s House. Mezzotint, 1846, 17.2 x 15.4 cm

 

 

 

 

5 Willy Lott’s House, 1811, 24.1 x 18.1 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London

 

 

 

 

6 Willy Lott’s House, 1811, 24 x 18.1 cm. Verso of Pl 5. Victoria and Albert Museum London

 

 

The year 1811 revealed a new outburst of interest in Willy Lott’s house. Constable now began to focus on the scene from a different perspective. Having originally explored the view from across the mill stream he turned his gaze to see the house from Flatford Mill itself looking over the mill-race. In a series of small oil-sketches he recorded the house and mill stream at various times of the day and with different light effects. The first of these appears on the back of a sketch of The Lane from East Bergholt to Flatford (Reynolds (I-P, 921, 11.36) and shows the stream at high water level (Pl 3). The second, a very handsome sketch that has often been reproduced and now hangs in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (Reynolds I-P, 919, 11.37) (Pl 5, Pl 6) shows the house already positioned as it was to be depicted in the Hay Wain of 1821 and includes the dog also in that painting. The second which is painted on the verso of this sketch (Reynolds I-P, 920), shows a slight adjustment of perspective and includes a horse in the left foreground. David Lucas’ mezzotint begun in part under Constable’s supervision in 1832, but not published until after Constable’s death in 1846, seems to incorporate elements of the first and third of these sketches showing the water at high level and placing the horse and rider (some see him as Constable’s father) in the right­ middle-foreground (see Pl 4).^[5]

 

 

7 Flatford Mill, 1811, 16.5 x 30 cm. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Paul Mellon Collection

 

 

In 1811 Constable reported on his activities in East Bergholt to Maria Bicknell who subsequently became his wife: ‘You ask me what I have been doing this summer. I fear I can give but a poor account of myself. I have tried Flatford Mill again, from the lock (whence you once made a drawing), and some smaller things.’^[6] Later he noted that he nearly ‘put his eyes out’ by his habit of painting in the middle of ‘bright hot summer days.’^[7] While his studies of Flatford Mill from the lock were developed into his Royal Academy painting of 1812, Flatford Mill from the Lock, Constable was not yet sufficiently satisfied with his views of Willy Lott’s House to consider a similar finished work. Later that summer he added an entirely new perspective to his repertoire in another hasty sketch, this time looking past Willy Lott’s house towards Flatford Mill over the mill stream (Reynoldsl-P,11.41) (Pl 7). It was as if Constable were bent on rotating his vision 360° and determined to exam­ine his subject from every angle. Of note in this sketch is the willow tree at the right and the figure in the doorway of the mill.

 

 

8 John Constable, Willy Lott’s House with Rainbow, dated ‘Oct^r 1^st 1812’.
Oil on paper laid down on canvas, 25.7 x 23.5 cm. Private collection

 

 

Returning to Flatford Mill in the summer and fall of 1812 Constable was still exploring how best to develop his vision of Willy Lott’s House into a subject that could be turned into a major painting. But now his ideas were gradually expanding. On 10 July 1812, he wrote to Maria Bicknell: ‘I am… perverse enough to be vain of some studies of landscapes which I have done – ‘Landscape which found me poor at first and keeps me so.’ I am sure you will laugh when I tell you I have found another very promising subject at Flatford Mill.’^[8] The subject that was ‘promising’ was the view of Willy Lott’s House that became a central part of his artistic vision. On 1 October 1812, he re-explored an earlier perspective of Willy Lott’s house, adding a rainbow and cow (Reynolds 1-P, 12.42) (Pl 8). Then a few days later, on 16 October 1812 he made his way to the Stour and painted another sketch (Reynolds 1-P, 969, 12.43) (Pl 9). This sketch, while not of Willy Lott’s House is important for it provides us with a crucial dating tool that allows us to make some judgements about his next painting, a sketch of Willy Lott’s house that shows The Valley Farm. 

 

 

9 The Banks of the Stour, 16 October 1812, size and whereabouts unknown

10a (right) Xradiograph of newly discovered Study for the Valley Farm (Pl 10, below)

 

 

 

10 Newly discovered Study for the Valley Farm, c1812–24, 69.1 x. 59.3 cm. Private collection USA

 

 

 

11 Comparison of pollarded willow with cattle-like forms in 1812 Constable paintings

 

 

The sketch in question involves a recently discovered painting (Pl 10) that was originally thought to have been a copy of The Valley Farm, Constable’s 1835 Royal Academy work. Technical analysis of this painting has shown, however, that it was not a copy, but a study for the final painting.^[9] An X-ray photograph of the first layer of this work reveals a palette knife sketch of Willy Lott’s house that pictures the house from a new perspective (Pl 10a). What is impor­tant about this sketch is that it includes several elements related to The Banks of the Stour. Among these are the dark band of clouds in the sky with light breaking above and below them, the boats in the foreground, and the similarly shaped pollarded willow trees. The X-ray also shows cattle-like forms below the willow tree next to Willy Lott’s house. At the same time, the distant willow in The Banks of the Stour shows a similar cow. That Constable initially associated cattle with the pollarded willow next to Willy Lott’s House at this time is further underscored by his sketch, Willy Lott’s House with rainbow (Reynolds I-P, 970, 1242) (see Pl 8, Pl 11) painted on 1 October 1812.^[10] In later depictions of his. subject these cows were replaced by human figures. What is most important about the x-ray sketch is the view adopted in it, for it marks the first appearance of this way of seeing Willy Lott’s house.

 

 

12 (left) Drawing of Willy Lott’s House on page 31 of the 1813 sketchbook, Pencil. Page size 8.9 x 12 cm

 

13 (right) Drawing of Willy Lott’s House on page 70 of Constable’s 1813 sketchbook. Pencil

 

 

Having decided on his new subject at Flatford Mill, Constable worked systematically to develop this subject into a major painting. In 1813 he returned to the site to explore new ways to follow up his ideas and made two small drawings of Willy Lott’s House that many scholars see as the beginnings of the Valley Farm motif. The first of these on page 31 (Reynolds I-P, 1030) (Pl 12) is interesting because it already shows a cow in the position of the first cow of The Valley Farm. This indicates that Constable now considered moving the cows from under the Willow to a more cen tral position. The boat near the landing is prominently displayed, and it was also introduced into the later work. Both the willow and the second tree behind the house are present in this sketch. The house remains closed in from the south-east by the trees and vegetation. Constable’s second drawing on page 70 of the same sketchbook(ReynoldsI-P,1062) (Pl 13) again examines the house from a similar perspective but adds new elements. In this study the central position, where the cow was placed in the earlier drawing, is occupied by a boat with two figures in it. There may be a log in the left front foreground. And the house may be open on the southeast with what may be a figure in the doorway. Here Constable seems to have toyed with two different ideas. The boat with the ferryman and passenger was now moved to the center of the composition, and the house was opened at the southeast. In both instances the house is drawn without a second story as depicted in the 1812 oil sketch.

As we shall see, the second of these drawings is closely related to Constable’s painting of The Ferry exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1814, but before we take up that work, we need to say something further about 1813. Not long after the two small sketches in his sketchbook of that year were drawn, Constable produced the central panel of what became one of his most beautiful drawings featuring Willy Lott’s House. This is the drawing now in the Witt Collection of the Courtauld Institute Galleries in London (Reynolds I-P, 1082, 13.20) (Pl 14). This drawing is itself intriguing because it was made in three parts. Ian Flemming-Williams has argued that the original drawing consisting of the central upright panel was produced in 1812 or 1813^[11]He feels the extensions were made ‘a year or two later.’ Reynolds believes these additions were made in 1813.^[12]

 

 

14 Willy Lott’s House, 1813. Pencil, 20 x 28.4 cm. Courtauld Institute Galleries, London (central panel of the drawing)

 

 

It seems to me that the appropriate dating for the central panel of this drawing is 1813 not long after the sketch of Willy Lott’s House on page 31 of the 1813 sketchbook was completed (see Pl 12, Pl 16). The evidence for this lies in the dark section of the bank in the right foreground, which is clearly depicted in the sketchbook drawing and in the Courtauld Institute’s work and suggests that the small drawing was done first. Moreover, the central panel of the Courtauld drawing, bears a striking similarity to the composition in the X-ray sketch of the Study for Valley Farm (Pl 15), revealing that Constable was now bent on exploring this vision in greater detail. As so many of his works in progress indicate, later additions were made. In this case a drawing which started in 1813 as an upright was transformed into a horizontal work after 1816. In dealing with what existed in 1813 we have to strip the work down to its central panel, just as in the case of the Study for the Valley Farm (Pl 15) we have to go back to the original (X-ray) sketch. What seems pretty clear from his 1813 drawings and sketches is that Constable originally envisioned his proposed new painting as an upright.

 

 

 

15 X-ray of Study for the Valley Farm (Pl 10)

 

 

Two additional points may be made about the central panel of the Courtauld Institute drawing. The first is that it does not include the willow tree. And the second is that it shows the house as having a second story with the southeast fully exposed and not hidden behind vegetation.

 

 

16 Drawing on page 31, 1813 sketchbook

 

 

Constable was now ready to proceed with his larger depiction of Willy Lott’s House. On 22 February 1814 he wrote to his friend John Dunthorne from London, ‘I am anxious about the large picture of Willy Lott’s house, which Mr. Nursey says promises uncommonly well in masses &c., and tones – but I am determined to detail but not retail it out.’^[13]

 

 

17 Landscape: The Ferry, 1814, 125.7 x 100.3 cm. Tate Gallery, London

 

 

Late in March Constable wrote to Maria Bicknell, ‘I have a large picture almost ready for the Exhibition.’^[14] This painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1814 as Landscape: the Ferry (Reynolds I-P, 1091, 14.2) (Pl 17). David Pike Watts, Constable’s uncle, upon seeing the painting decided to give him some advice on what he thought were Constable’s deficiencies. On 12 April 1814, he wrote, ‘Finish! Finish!’ What is anything unfinished? … Allow me, dear John, to offer an opinion on your Boat Landscape which according to the measure of my poor judgement is the best from your Easel (except the small copy of Claude formerly painted [Hagar and the Angel]). I can only appreciate an opinion as such defective talent as I possess in the Art enables me; and in this Boat Landscape, where there is much to admire, there is this sad Trait to lament, namely hurry and slight of Finish. This is the unfortunate Sign of an hurried Mind and consequently perplex’d Pencil; in short of that fatal habit, Procrastination.’^[15]

Constable’s uncle’s reaction to the Ferry was echoed by Joseph Farrington, the Royal Academician and diarist. On 6 April 1814 Farrington recorded in his diary. ‘Constable called … I told Him the objection made to His pictures was their being unfinished; that Thomson gave Him great credit for the taste of His design in His larger picture [The Ferry] last exhibited, & for the indication shewn in the Colouring, but He had not carried His finishing far enough. I recommend to Him to look at some of the pictures of Claude before He returns to His Country studies, and to attend to the admirable manner in which all the parts of His pictures are completed. He thanked me much for the conversation we had, from which He said He should derive benefit.’^[16] Constable appears to have taken Farrington’s advice and re-examined the Claudes. By 4 May he was writing to Maria, ‘I took several beautiful walks in search of food for my pencil this summer when I hope to do a great deal in landscape … I assure you I feel great hope and confidence in myself on that subject.’^[17] Earlier he had written to John Dunthorne, ‘I have much to say to you about finishing of my studies more in future – but I look to do a great deal better in future. I am determined to finish a small picture on the spot for every one I intend to make in [the] future. But this I have always talked about but never yet done–I think however my mind is more settled and determined than ever on this point.’^[18]

 

 

18 Infrared reflectogram of part of Study for the Valley Farm (Pl 10)

 

 

 

19 Detail of Pl 18 showing man on horseback

 

 

To overcome the criticism levied against him by his uncle and Joseph Farrington, Constable determined to work on finish during the summer of 1814. This preoccupation seems to have led him to return to the sketch at the base of the painting that eventually became The Study for the Valley Farm. Now Constable used his drawing of Willy Lott’s House in the Courtauld Institute to ‘detail out’ his earlier work. Having also re-examined Claude Lorraine’s paintings, particularly his Landscape Hagar and the Angel, Constable seems to have pursued his subject with a renewed intensity. Rather than select a fresh canvas for the changes he had in mind, he broke with his standard pattern of beginning an entirely new work and drew directly on the earlier sketch. The infrared analysis of The Study for the Valley Farm shows this drawing quite explicitly (Pl 18). As the drawing indicates, the cattle below the pollarded willow were now taken out and replaced by a man on horseback (Pl 19). Here one thinks of his earlier sketches that included a horse in this location. Later, as we shall see, the horse and rider were removed for a standing woman with two children. Meanwhile the cows were moved to the center of the composition where the single cow had been placed in the drawing from his 1813 sketchbook. The ferryman and passenger, once depicted in a sketchy palette knife manner were also carefully redrawn and the boat was moved somewhat to the left. In the x-ray sketch the woman in the boat had been depicted with a white object in her lap that may well have been a small dog also shown in The Mill Stream of 1814. In the new drawing the woman is shown barefooted, with water in the bottom of the boat, and she is now holding the dog in her arms. A second boat with a straight prow like that in The Mill Stream was added to the composition at the middle left. The shed at the right of the house was also added over what had been a bush in the x-ray depiction. The roof of Willy Lott’s House was reconfigured. On the slope to the left of the willow tree a plowman was drawn plowing uphill from right to left; later he was repainted plowing from left to right. Further details included two moor hens in the left foreground and a waterfowl rising off the water not far from the boat. The infrared shows a reconfigured woman passenger with a dog on her lap that she is holding in her arms.

How far the reconfiguration of The Study for Valley Farm went in the summer of 1814 is not clear. There is some evidence that shows that Constable attempted to finish parts of his reconfigured painting on site. For example, the bush at the left was painted with great care and its brushwork suggests that it was based upon direct observation of the vegetation growing near the mill-race (Pl 20). Not only were the cows moved, but new figures were added. The initial idea of a man on horseback was quickly abandoned for the standing woman and children, and the distant figure of a man about to cross a stile.

 

 

20 Photo of Willy Lott’s House showing vegetation. Insert depicts brushwork on the bush of Study for the Valley Farm (Pl 10)

 

 

 

21 Sketch on page 67 of Constable’s 1813 sketchbook

 

 

In reference to the new figures it should be noted that Constable had already developed a part of this scene (from the reverse angle) in a small drawing on page 67 of his 1813 sketchbook (Reynolds I-P, 1059) (Pl 21). In this drawing we see the side of a house (Willy Lott’s?) beyond which there is a willow and a tall man with hat standing at a stile. In the left middle foreground Constable has drawn a group of children with a seated adult. Apparently, a horse and rider are moving past the corner of the house (only the hind quarter of the horse is visible). What this drawing shows is how Constable’s mind locked in on figures he associated with a particular scene and how these visions became almost icon-like in his depiction of that scene later. The grouping of the standing woman with children and the man at the stile became a fixed ‘text’ for the Valley Farm.

 

 

22 Detail showing woman and children as well as man standing at a stile in Study for the Valley Farm (Pl 10)

 

 

As the detail shows (Pl 22), Constable reworked the surface of the original sketch of a Study for the Valley Farm, adding the woman and children in rather cursory fashion. The same can be said for the man crossing the stile, and an even sketchier depiction of the plowman can be seen at the top to the left of the willow. He had originally shown the plowman plowing in the opposite direction. Pentimenti under the tree still shows the original palette-knife cows. The painting style we see here follows Constable’s earlier dictum that he was prepared to ‘detail,’ but not ‘retail’ out his paintings of Willy Lott’s House. And yet, as we saw Constable was determined to work on ‘finish’ in 1814. The Study for the Valley Farm is revealing because it shows the constant tension Constable faced between his way of capturing a scene and the ‘eye salve,’ as he once called it, that the public and professional painting world required for a finished painting. In this case, Constable decided to produce just such a work, but not on the canvas that had brought him this far.

 

 

23 The Valley Farm, 1815, 61 x 50.8 cm. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

 

 

He now determined to use the ideas he had developed on his Study for the Valley Farm to create an entirely new painting of Willy Lott’s house. The result was one of his most impressive and appealing early paintings. In this work (Pl 23), which is usually known as the Lenox Valley Farm for James Lenox who bought it in 1848 (Reynolds I-P, 1254, 15.42: now in the Ashmolean Museum Oxford), Constable combined the ideas he had developed in the 1814 Ferry with those he had experimented with on his Study for the Valley Farm. Willy Lott’s house and the trees at the right are shown much as they were originally conceived in the Ferry. But in this work they have received a high degree of finish. The same can be said of the vegetation below the trees extending to the mill stream. The elements introduced from his Study for Valley Farm include the woman and children posed in exactly the same positions they occupied in the other work, but now they are more carefully painted. The same can be said for the man at the stile. The second boat is also here, but now it has a man leaning into it, and the ferry once dominant in the centre of the Ferry was moved to the far right and later over-painted (its pentimenti remains). The log in the left foreground is straight out of the Study for Valley Farm, but it, too, has been more elaborately finished. The distant haystack is another element that Constable borrowed from the earlier work.

It is generally believed that Constable completed the Lenox Valley Farm in 1815.^[19] This work indicated that he could produce the type of highly finished painting that Joseph Farrington and his uncle wanted. It also shows that he had taken Farrington’s advice and studied Claude carefully. In this painting Constable’s flowers have a distinct Claude-like quality which differs a good deal from the vegetation depicted in the Ferry and that which he composed on his Study for the Valley Farm in 1814. Moreover the foliage of his trees has been elaborately constructed and some of its backlit outline forms resemble those found in Claude’s paintings. What is curious is that Constable made no reference to this painting in his letters to his family and friends. Nor does he seem to have exhibited the work at the Royal Academy or British Institution. Why was this the case? Particularly when this was just the type of painting that his uncle David Pike Watts and Joseph Farrington would have admired. While none of us can enter Constable’s mind on this subject, it may be argued that the issue with the Lenox Valley Farm was precisely that it was too finished. In taking up the challenge that Farrington had posed, Constable had ‘retailed out’ his painting. In the process the painting became a construction and not a part of his direct inner experience with nature. This was a painterly painting. But years earlier he had broken with Ramsey Richard Reinagle over the same issue, noting to Farrington that ‘execution’ and ‘the mechanism of painting’ were Reinagle’s ‘delight;’ painters of this type ‘looked only to the surface,’ he lamented to Farrington, ‘and not to the mind.’^[20] To John Dunthorne he had explained his break with Reinagle by stating, ‘I know him to be no inward man.’^[21] Constable may well have realized that the Lenox Valley Farm presented him with a dangerous temptation. He could follow the road of ‘finish’ (encouraged by Farrington and Thomson) to success in the Academy, and quite possibly to public acclaim, but to do so was to break with the inner vision which he had struggled so hard to establish as a ‘natural painter,’ a vision that united him to the world of nature whose secrets he sought to unravel through his paintings. For Constable this was a deep moral quest. If he wavered at all, he wavered only briefly. Constable quickly rejected the temptations of ‘finish’ to pursue his earlier search for the inner life of the natural scenes he sought to portray.

While Constable took his vision of Willy Lott’s house in the direction of the Valley Farm motif in both the Ferry (1814) and the Lenox Valley Farm (1815) concentrating on the upright image he had first produced in his palette knife sketch on The Study for Valley Farm (1812), he also considered other possibilities. As early as 1814 he explored a horizontal depiction of the house. Here, too, a quick sketch was produced showing the house from Flatford Mill (Reynolds 1-P, 1193, 14.47) (Pl 24) followed by a more elaborate painting, The Mill Stream (Reynolds 1-P, 1192, 14.46), now at Christchurch Mansion, Ipswich (Pl 25). The Mill Stream was much closer to the Ferry than to the Lenox Valley Farm in its degree of finish. It confirms the fact that Constable was not persuaded that the road he had adopted in the Lenox Valley Farm was the correct one for him. What he was searching for was a way to transform the quick impressions of changing light that dominated his sketches into larger and equally effective studio works. The sketch of the Mill Stream below is a good example of such a work.

 

 

24 Sketch for the Mill Stream, 1814. Oil on board, 20.8 x 29.2 cm. Tate Gallery, London

 

 

 

25 The Mill Stream, 1814, 71.1 x 91.5 cm. Colchester and Ipswich Museums Service

 

 

Here was the ‘small picture on the spot’ that he had promised Dunthorne early in 1814 to make for every larger painting thereafter. The difficulty remained how to take these ‘quick notes’ and transform them into a more permanent text. The Mill Stream (Pl 25) shows how much could be lost in such an effort. While it is a handsome studio work it lacks much of the life that marked the sketch upon which it was based. The addition of the ferry with passenger shows that Constable was still thinking of the approach he had begun in the Study for the Valley Farm and the 1814 Ferry. There is a high degree of similarity in the way the ferry boat is painted in the Mill Stream and the way the second boat is drawn in on his Study for the Valley Farm of 1812 (see Pl 26). In both cases the boat has a rather straight prow and is high in front and lower in the water at the rear. The infrared drawing, one must add, was quite different from the form the boat was later given in the Lenox Valley Farm and on the final surface of the Study for the Valley Farm that was completed in the 1820s. In addition it can be seen that the young woman passenger in the Mill Stream has a similar light–coloured object in her lap as that shown in the x-ray of the passenger in the ferry included in the palette knife sketch of the Study for the Valley Farm.

 

 

26 (left) Detail of boat, infra-red of sketch for Study for Valley Farm, 1812. (right) Detail of boat with woman passenger from The Mill Stream, 1814

 

 

 

 

27 The Mill Stream, 1814. Pencil, 9.6 x 15.8 cm. Private collection

 

 

Graham Reynolds has identified two drawings of Willy Lott’s house as dating from 1814, the year in which the Mill Stream was completed. The first of these (Reynolds I-P, 1195, 14.50) (Pl 27) is a squared-up drawing of the house from the same perspective as the Mill Stream. This sketch shows what appears to be the form of a horse on the bank next to Willy Lott’s house. The squaring may have been used in part to transfer the image to the Mill Stream. At the same time the drawing shows no sign of the ferry boat or the young man fishing in the right foreground.

The second drawing Graham Reynolds has introduced for 1814 (Reynolds I-P, 1210, 14.61) is of particular interest because in order to produce it Constable employed a mechanical drawing device that had been developed from an idea that had been much earlier used by, among others, Leonardo da Vinci. The tool Constable devised employed a glass plate which allowed him to record an accurate picture of a scene. In this case we are shown Willy Lott’s house quite literally as if caught through the lens of a camera (indeed, he was probably using a camera obscura). What is of particular interest in this depiction of the house is the close correspondence of the right two-thirds of this drawing with what became the Hay Wain. But of even greater interest for our understanding of what happened next in his depiction of this subject is the willow tree that stands prominently to the left of the house. Constable’s pseudo ‘camera’ clearly shows the willow tree still standing in 1814 when he made this impression. Indeed, the willow had been an important part of his composition of the Valley Farm motif from its inception. Not only was it present in his original Study for the Valley Farm (1812), in the Ferry (1814), and in the Lenox Valley Farm of 1815, but it had been pictured in several of his earlier drawings and sketches.

 

 

28 Willy Lott’s House, 1814. Pencil, made probably with camera obscura, 20.8 x 29.8 cm. Private collection

 

 

The year 1816 was important for Constable and his relationship to his Suffolk home and surroundings. Constable’s mother died in March of the previous year, leaving a great void in his life and in the East Bergholt household. She had always been one of his strongest supporters and a gentle critic. Constable had thrown himself into his work to make up for his tragic loss, thus the Lenox Valley Farm of 1815 can, in part, be seen as a tribute to his mother and her faith in him as a landscape painter. The tragedy of 1815 was repeated the following spring when Constable’s father died on 14 May 1816. Hearing of his father’s death, Constable rushed back to East Bergholt from London, arriving there on 19 May. The funeral was held the following day. A serious storm had blown through the area shortly after Golding Constable’s death, making it difficult for some of the family friends to get to East Bergholt. A number of trees seem to have been uprooted by the storm. This is of significance because on 23 May 1816, just three days after his father’s funeral, Constable made a drawing showing a collapsed tree lying on top of another tree that it has broken off in its fall (Reynolds 1-P, 1276, 16.12) (Pl 29). Constable rarely drew or painted dead, or cut down, trees, and so this work is unusual. But on this occasion the symbol of the down tree may have resonated with the loss of his father, who had been the pillar in the household. What is also of interest is the location of this scene. Given the slope behind the tree and the houses on it, the scene depicted shows some conformity to the position of the willow previously featured in his Valley Farm compositions. The drawing pictures two workmen in the process of cutting off the stump of the broken tree at the base while another holds a rope attached to the fallen tree.

 

 

29 A Landscape with a Fallen Tree. Dated May 23^rd 1816.
Pencil, 9.5 x 15 cm

 

 

Constable’s next dated drawing, made on 23 July 1816, just two months after the Fallen Tree study, is a quick sketch of Willy Lott’s house (Reynolds 1-P, 1277, 16.15) (Pl 30). This shows the house at twilight from the mill. Perhaps sensing a break with his home now that both his mother and father had passed away and the family was clearly pulling in separate directions, Constable appears to have concentrated with renewed vigour on coming to terms with this essential Suffolk scene. On 29 July 1816 he produced one of his most impressive oil sketches of Willy Lott’s house, which was later owned by CR Leslie and another painter, Thomas Churchyard, and now hangs in Christchurch Mansion, Ipswich (Reynolds 1-P, 1291, 16.23) (Pl 31). This sketch was based directly on his glass-mechanism drawing of the house of 1815 (shown here again as Pl 32). But there is one notable difference in the depiction of the scene in this painting versus the sketch — the willow tree, clearly visible in the drawing, has disappeared in the painted version of the subject.

 

 

30 Willy Lott’s House, 23 July 1816. Pencil, 14.5 x 9.5 cm.
Musée Grobet Labadie, Marseille

 

 

What the summer of 1816 showed is that Constable was rethinking his approach to the Valley Farm. As the Ipswich sketch shows he was moving in the direction that would take him to the Hay Wain five years later. At the same time, as we will see, he also returned to viewing the house from the perspective he had developed in the Ferry and the Lenox Valley Farm. More than anything, he seems to have tried to return to the past in order to link his new ideas with earlier perceptions. Here we see Constable’s remarkable pertinacity and willingness to go back again and again to struggling with the expression of his ideas. It has often been noted that Constable rarely painted anything twice the same way – despite the fact that he regularly painted the same scenes.^[22] In each instance he tried to refine his ideas, see new details in how light served to shape the scene and subject, and how the influence of both could be integrated into his brushwork. At the same time his habit of going back to build on older ideas makes dating his works extremely difficult.

 

 

31 Willy Lott’s House, 29 July 1816, 19.4 x 23.8 cm. Colchester and Ipswich Museums Service

 

 

 

32 Willy Lott’s House, 1814, showing willow tree at left.
Pencil, made probably with camera obscura, 20.8 x 29.8 cm. Private collection

 

 

 

The dating problem is illustrated quite clearly by two additional sketches of Willy Lott’s house that Constable produced in 1816 (Pl 33, Pl 34). These sketches currently belong to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Both show Willy Lott’s house from the perspective of the Ferry and the Lenox Valley Farm.

 

 

33 Sketch for The Valley Farm, 1816, 25.4 x 21 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London

 

 

 

34 Sketch for The Valley Farm, 1816–17, 34 x 28 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London

 

 

In the past the dating of these sketches has created considerable difficulty. Graham Reynolds in his catalogue raisonné has dated these works to 1835, the year in which he completed The Valley Farm now in the Tate Gallery in London. Leslie Parris and Ian Fleming-Williams argue in their 1991 catalogue that these works should be dated to 1812–13. I would like to argue that the sketch at the top left (Reynolds II-P, 989, 35.3) was painted in the summer of 1816 not long after the pollarded willow was cut down. The painting clearly shows the stump with markings that would indicate the recent felling of the tree (Pl 35). The second of the sketches (Reynolds II-P, 988, 35.2) (Pl 34) was made sometime thereafter, possibly even during the following year, for it shows the underbrush already growing where the willow once stood.

 

 

35 Detail of Pl 33 showing stump of cut-down willow tree

 

 

What convinces me even more of this dating is that Constable seems to have returned to the Valley Farm scene with the specific intent of reconstructing his natural relationship to the subject in the wake of the Lenox Valley Farm. In short, he rejected the idea of ‘finish,’ which Farrington and his uncle had urged upon him, for one that restored his direct relationship with nature. Thus we can conclude that the scene shows, as the trees reflect, a close conformity to the natural setting. The willow is clearly absent in both works. The stump records what has become of it. And Constable has gone back to facing the scene directly on site.

Constable’s reconsideration of his subject is suggested by further evidence. The drawing of Willy Lott’s house now in the Witt Collection of the Courtauld Institute, to which I have alluded earlier, started, as I noted, with the central panel which was drawn in 1813. That panel was constructed in such a manner that it depicted Willy Lott’s house and the tree that stood behind it, but did not include enough space at the left to depict the willow tree featured in the 1814 Ferry. While the willow was still standing in 1813, Constable’s initial composition had no room for it, so it was not included. By the summer of 1816 the tree no longer existed. Thus as Constable’s expanded his drawing by adding the left and right panels to complete his horizontal composition (Pl 36), the left panel should have included the tree if the drawing predated 1816. As it does not include the willow, we may conclude that it was composed after this date, when the tree disappeared. Thus the completed Courtauld drawing should be dated to the year 1816, or later.

 

 

36 Willy Lott’s House, showing left and right panels added in 1816. Pencil. Courtauld Institute Galleries

 

 

Here too, the suggestion is that Constable was reconsidering his vision of Willy Lott’s house. As he was to do in the Hay Wain he was exploring the possibility of seeing the house as a horizontal, rather than an upright, composition. His ideas were now moving not only back to nature, but beyond the Valley Farm motif to anew composition. The idea of spreading out his composition was tested not only in the Courtauld drawing, but in an oil sketch recently discovered that Graham Reynolds has identified directly with the Courtauld image. This oil sketch (Reynolds I-P, 1081, 13.21) (Pl 37) conforms closely to the Courtauld drawing but, as is true of the drawing, it does not show the willow tree. It does, however, show the white highlighted cloud in the sky that is also featured in the Victoria and Albert oil sketch that shows the stump of the cut-down tree. The highlighted sky motif (featuring a distinct white cloud) became associated with the Valley Farm composition from this time onwards. It certainly became an important highlight in the repainting of his Study for the Valley Farm in the early 1820s, and it was later incorporated into the Valley Farm of 1835 as well.

 

 

37 Willy Lott’s House, 34.3 x 43.2 cm. Private collection, New York

 

 

There is a second interesting feature of this oil sketch that is worth noting. Pencil lines in the sky of this painting closely conform to the area where a dark band of clouds was initially painted in his Study for the Valley Farm (as shown on the X-ray). It is possible that Constable considered a similar formation of clouds for this work but then changed his mind. At the same time, the white cloud motif depicted in this work ties it directly to the Victoria and Albert sketch of 1816 discussed earlier. Given this linkage, it is logical to argue that both the drawing and the horizontal sketch should be dated (along with the Victoria and Albert sketch showing the tree stump) to 1816, or shortly thereafter.

For Constable, 1816 was a year of many significant events. His father’s death in May provided him with a small legacy that allowed him to contemplate marriage. Then in July his well-to-do uncle, David Pike Watts, passed away. Unfortunately, Constable was not a beneficiary in his uncle’s will. Nevertheless, he decided to accept the offer of his good friend John Fisher, later Archdeacon of Salisbury, to officiate at his wedding, and Constable and his bride, Maria Bicknell, were married on 2 October at St Martin-in-the-Fields in London. After honeymooning with the Fishers at Osmington near Weymouth Bay, Constable and his bride returned to London and settled down to married life at 63 Charlotte Street.

As his studies of 1816 demonstrated, Constable was still considering the Valley Farm motif from two distinct perspectives. The first incorporated his upright vision of the house on which he worked again and again. The second now included an expanding horizontal vision which was carefully worked out in the Courtauld Institute drawing. For the next two years Constable concentrated on other subjects. His 1817 paintings at the Royal Academy were a picture of Flatford Mill and A Cottage in a Cornfield. His academy exhibition paintings for 1818 have yet to be identified. But by 1819 Constable had made up his mind to produce a larger work for the annual exhibition at the Royal Academy and for this he returned to the Valley Farm. The painting that resulted was The White Horse now in the Frick Collection, New York (Pl 38).

 

 

38 The White Horse (full-scale sketch), 1815–19, 127.5 x 183 cm. National Gallery, Washington, DC

 

 

Once again, the perspective on Willy Lott’s house shifted. This time it was presented from the lower end of the Mill Stream where the island known as the Sprong separated the river from the cut leading to the mill. The scene shows a horse being barged across the Stour. The composition is horizontal in keeping with the theme he began to develop in 1816. A full-sized study for this painting is in the National Gallery in Washington (Pl 39). The White Horse was very favourably received at the Academy and was subsequently bought by his friend John Fisher for 100 guineas. It was also the work that earned him his election to the position of Associate Royal Academician (ARA) in 1819.

 

 

39 The White Horse, 1819, 131.5 x 187.8 cm. Frick Collection, New York

 

 

In The White Horse Constable wrestled with the earlier question of finish. As the sketch shows, he was chiefly concerned with chiaroscuro, that is with the questions of light and shade, in his sketch for the painting. Here, as before, he rejected the demands of a polished painting in favour of his earlier identification with nature, but in the reworking of his subject in what became the Frick painting he was able to create a new compromise between his conception of nature and the level of finish the Academy and public demanded. The White Horse was not only the first of his ‘six-foot’ canvases, it was the first of his major paintings in which his conception of nature could be transferred from the direct experience of his sketches to a successful large studio work. The White Horse, like the work that followed it, Stratford Mill (1820) is a happy painting. Constable was at last at peace with himself and his vision. The tranquillity of married life and an expanding family which included a son, John Charles, born in 1817, and a daughter, Maria Louisa, born in 1819, gave him a sense of wholeness that expressed itself in his work.

Having achieved a new plateau in his art with the next of his six-foot paintings, Stratford Mill, a work he was particularly fond of, Constable determined to return to the subject of Willy Lott’s house and the core of his Suffolk identity. Both The White Horse and Stratford Mill instilled in him a new confidence that he could take the subject he had wrestled with for nearly a decade and transform it at last into a major painting. As had been the case with The White Horse and Stratford Mill, Constable determined to compose a full-sized sketch for this painting in his London studio (Pl 40).

 

 

40 The Hay Wain (full-scale sketch), 1821, 137 x 188 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London

 

 

Here he called on all his earlier ‘visual notes’ on the Valley Farm to compose his subject. Constable wrote of the resulting painting, The Hay Wain (Pl 41) to John Fisher on 1 April 1821, noting that he thought it was ‘not as grand’ as Stratford Mill, but that it had ‘a rather more novel look than I expected.’^[23] In The Hay Wain Constable achieved what he had set out to accomplish earlier, that is, a blending of his naturalistic representation of his native Suffolk scenery, with the more formal demands of a major gallery work. In The Hay Wain one gets the sense that all of Constable’s efforts to go back and regroup in order to advance were at last paying off.

 

 

41 The Hay Wain, 1821, 130.5 x 185.5 cm. National Gallery, London

 

 

What makes The Hay Wain so appealing is that it communicates directly what Constable felt about his native scenery in the period from 1810 to 1820. Here was man and nature in wonderful harmony, just as colour and light were in equal harmony with one another. Finish balanced chiaroscuro. The clouds and sunlight blend into one another as the land seems to be embraced by the water. The painting exudes a freshness that the viewer can almost smell. The Frenchman Charles Nodier, who saw the painting at the Royal Academy in 1821, echoed the same sentiment when he wrote, ‘It is water, air and sky.’ Nodier also observed how Constable had been able to make peace with his natural vision while providing enough finish to please even the critics on this occasion. Viewing the painting from different distances produced entirely different effects. ‘’Near’, Nodier wrote, ‘it is only broad daubings of ill-laid colour which offend the touch as well as the sight, they are so coarse and uneven. At the distance of a few steps it is a picturesque country, rustic dwelling, a low river where little waves foam over the pebbles, a cart crossing a pond.’^[24] In short, Constable had developed a means of bringing his work into natural focus that transcended the painterly methods of the past. His rejection of the easy path that had briefly tempted him in the Lenox Valley Farm had born rich rewards. As Nodier added, there were few masters ‘ancient or modem’ whose masterpieces could stand up against Constable’s great work. Meanwhile Fisher had toyed with the idea of buying it.^[25] Writing to him, Constable noted about The Hay Wain, ‘It was born a companion to your picture in sentiment. It must be yours.’^[26] Unfortunately, this was not to be. As is well known, by 1824 The Hay Wain was in Paris where it created a major stir among French painters.

With the completion of The Hay Wain Constable seems to have exhausted his preoccupation with Willy Lott’s house. Or at least this is what our current knowledge of Constable’s oeuvre suggests. The house does not reappear in Reynold’s catalogue raisonné until 1829 when Constable produced a small composite drawing of it on Christmas Day which I will discuss later. It therefore appears that he was increasingly cut off from the Valley Farm motif. But this is somewhat deceptive. What the record indicates is that while the horizontal composition he had developed in 1816 reached its fruition in The Hay Wain in 1821, his earlier preoccupation with the upright version of Willy Lott’s house was not abandoned and continued to intrigue him in the 1820s. There is some evidence that Constable went back to his Study for the Valley Farm between 1820 and 1824 and made a number of additional changes. One of the first of these involved the sky. In place of the dark band of clouds, revealed in the X-ray, Constable now laid in a sky that is very close to several of his 1821–22 sky studies. In the fall of 1821 Constable had written to Fisher, ‘We have had noble clouds & effects of light & dark & colour – as is always the case in such seasons as the present.’^[27] He added that he had been doing a good deal of ‘skying’ in his outdoor sketches, and the results were now transferred to this work (Pl 42).^[28]

 

 

42 (left) The Study for the Valley Farm, 1812–1824, detail of sky. (right) Cloud study, 1822 (Reynolds II, 374, 22.55), detail. Private collection

 

 

Further changes to this canvas were the product of his visit to Coleorton, the home of Sir George and Lady Beaumont, where Constable resided for six weeks towards the close of 1823. George Beaumont was a serious amateur painter, collector, and strong supporter of the Royal Academy. He was also a driving force behind the creation of the British National Gallery and provided it with a bequest that included some of its most important early works. Constable had come to know Beaumont and his wife through his mother who was a friend of Lady Beaumont. Their first meeting seems to have been in 1795. Later when he came to London the friendship expanded. In 1811 Sir George was concerned about Constable’s health and convinced him to take a daily walk to Grosvenor Square, where he resided, to copy some of his paintings. His excellent collection included several important Claude Lorrain works which made a deep impression on the young painter from East Bergholt. Among these was the beautiful Landscape with Hagar and the Angel. Beaumont was so enamoured of this work that he took it with him wherever he went. It may be fair to say that Constable, shared Beaumont’s admiration for this painting, to which he remained deeply attracted for the rest of his life. At the same time, he was also taken with its companion, Claude’s Landscape with Goatherds and Goats. Starting in 1801 Constable made several copies of Hagar and the Angel. One of these he later gave to his friend John Fisher. It may be no exaggeration to say that Constable was haunted by the image of Hagar and the Angel, a work that profoundly influenced his painting. Moreover it was precisely the Valley Farm motif that became most closely associated with this work.

In 1823 Beaumont was in the process of presenting his collection to the British people. The National Gallery was taking form, and Constable was aware that he would not have access to the collection much longer. On 10 October 1823, he received an invitation from the Beaumonts to visit them at Coleorton. Constable immediately accepted. On 21 October he wrote to Maria that he was ‘in a room full of Claudes… real Claudes, and Wilsons and Poussins & almost at the summit of my earthly ambitions.’ ^[29] Not only was he in the presence of Hagar and the Angel again, but he was also able to make a careful copy of Goatherds. On 5 November he wrote to Maria: ‘I have a little Claude in hand, a grove scene of great beauty and I wish to make a nice copy from it to be useful to me as long as I live. It contains almost all that I wish to do in landscape.’^[30] Constable believed that Claude had sketched Goatherds in the open air. The copy he made in 1823 (Reynold II-P, 424, 23.36) now hangs in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Constable stayed with the Beaumonts well into December of that year. In fact, he toyed with staying over for Christmas, but finally changed his mind when Maria put her foot down and reminded him that he had a wife and family to think of. As for his prized Claudes, she suggested, that she might just ‘throw them out of the window’ when he returned.^[31]

But Constable was not prepared to forget the Claudes he had studied so carefully at the Beaumonts. While at Coleorton, he seems to have suggested to Sir George that reworking older paintings was a good idea. As his Study for the Valley Farm reveals he had long practised this approach himself. Now he apparently recommended the method to Beaumont. A year later Sir George commented on the idea in a letter to him. Noting that he had been ill and had for some time lost ‘all relish for the art,’ he added, ‘My appetite however is returned, altho not so keenly as before, but I have been endeavouring (according to your excellent metaphorical expression) to “whip up” one or two of my old pictures.’ He noted with some humour, ‘I hope I shall not carry your metaphor too far and whip them to sleep.’ ^[32] In the meantime, Constable had been engaged in doing the same thing with his Study for the Valley Farm which he was now ‘whipping up’ into a new painting that could combine his understanding of Claude with his own Suffolk heritage. This time, unlike his earlier effort in the Lenox Valley Farm, Constable determined that he should follow the path of Claude, not in finish, which he had rejected earlier, but in structure and in tone. What emerged was a composition that became refined in a new Claudian sense. The essence of Hagar and the Angel was the romantic tree, and the way that it resonated with the angelic and human forms. Above all there was the remarkable tonality of the work – a soft glowing light that pervaded the whole painting. Constable was quite prepared to follow this vision (Pl 43).

 

 

43 (left) Claude Lorrain, Landscape with Hagar and the Angel, 1646, 52.7 x 43.8 cm. National Gallery, London. (right) Study for the Valley Farm, c1812–24, 69.1 x 59.3 cm. cm. Private collection

 

 

 

44 (left) Study of Ash Trees, 1820, 32.8 x 23.8 Victoria and Albert Museum, London and (right) Two Ash Trees, 1810, 12 .2 x 20.2 cm.cm. Louvre, Paris

 

 

At the same time, Goatherds had suggested a highly naturalistic approach that Constable identified with his own open-air sketches. The reworking of the Study for the Valley Farm was therefore designed to incorporate the best elements of both works. As can be seen in the comparison of Hagar and the Angel and the Study for the Valley Farm Constable met with some success in these efforts. To achieve his goal Constable felt compelled to restructure the tree at the right of the composition to match that in the Claude masterpiece. The figures found in Hagar and the Angel, were reproduced in the ferryman and passenger. To find the right tree Constable went back to one of his finest tree drawings of 1820, a Study of ash trees (Reynolds II-P, 203, 20.85) now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London see Pl 44, left). He seems to have used it and an earlier drawing of an ash tree (Reynolds 1-P, 827, 10.3) (see Pl 44, right) to reconfigure the right side of his composition. The result was one of Constable’s most romantic trees. Its tuning-fork structure echoed the soft curving lines of Claude’s masterpiece. While the light of the painting is not the glowing light of the Italian countryside, it is nevertheless an equivalently gleaming version of ‘God’s own sunlight’ that flooded the vistas of his native Suffolk.

In reworking The Study for Valley Farm Constable relied on several stylistic elements he found in Claude’s Goatherds. As he had pointed out to Maria, he had made a careful study of this painting so that he might be able to use its ideas for the rest of his life. For Constable both Hagar and the Angel and Goatherds represented the perfect paintings. As if to absorb its very essence Constable slept with Goatherds in his room every night.^[33] Once again he carefully studied Claude’s finish, and what is interesting about his copy of this painting (Pl 45) is that it includes brushwork in several areas that he soon incorporated into his Study for the Valley Farm.

 

 

45 Landscape with Goatherds and Goats, after Claude, 1823, painted at Sir George Beaumont’s home in Coleorton.
Oil on canvas, 55.3 x 44.5 cm. Art Gallery of New South Wales

 

 

One of the areas that Constable was particularly interested in was the feathery brushwork that had been used by Claude in the middle portion of his painting. Constable had rarely, if ever, used such brushwork before. But in the wake of this study, he was to re-paint the elderberry bush next to Willy Lott’s House in his Study for the Valley Farm using the same brushwork (Pl 46).

 

 

46 (left) Detail of Pl 45. (right) Detail of Study for the Valley Farm (Pl 10)

 

 

A similar parallel can be found in his version of Goatherds at the base of the principal tree, where there seem to be vines growing, and the passage he now painted at the base of the new tree he added to his painting (Pl 47).

 

 

47 Study for the Valley Farm (detail left) and Constable’s copy of Claude’s Goatherds (detail right)

 

 

There is also an interesting relationship between the back lit leaves in the branch hanging down from the top of his version of Goatherds and part of the foliage now pictured in the Study for the Valley Farm. While it is not entirely clear when the boatman and passenger were reconfigured in his Study for the Valley Farm, the final composition of this pair so closely echoes Hagar and the Angel in Claude’s work that it is difficult to separate the two.

While Constable was willing to experiment with Claude’s level of finish, as he did on the elderberry bush next to Willy Lott’s house, he resisted going further in this direction in other parts of his painting. The two passages at the left that compare the vegetation surrounding the tree in Goatherds (Pl 47, right) with that in his Study for Valley Farm (Pl 47, left) show how he dealt with this issue. In the Study for Valley Farm he toned down the foliage reducing its individual prominence while retaining the modulation of chiaroscuro he admired in the Claude work. What this indicates is that Constable’s lack of finish, the accusation that bedevilled him for much of his life, was a matter of deliberate choice. Constable preferred ambiguity in dealing with light and shade to clear-cut formulas, even those of the highly admired Claude. In this he continued to follow his own vision. The reconfiguration of the Valley Farm motif may have had its roots in his visit to Coleorton and his study of Beaumont’s Claudes, but in digesting these works Constable preserved his own originality.

To what extent Constable continued to work on the Valley Farm motif is not entirely clear. CR Leslie noted that Constable could never leave a painting alone and that in this sense his paintings were never finished works. While the Study for the Valley Farm, as we know it today, was largely completed by the mid 1820s – my own inclination is to say by 1824 – Constable could not help but make further additions (or subtractions) to his painting. Meanwhile he set to work on one of his most important works, The Lock, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in the spring of 1824. Here, too, Claude’s influence was clearly visible. Constable wrote to John Fisher: ‘My picture is liked at the Academy. Indeed it forms a decided feature and its light cannot be put out, because it is the light of nature – the mother of all that is valuable in poetry, painting or anything else – where an appeal to the soul is required. The language of the heart is the only one that is universal.’ ‘My execution annoys most of them and all the scholastic ones.’ He added, ‘Perhaps the sacrifices I make for lightness and brightness is too much, but these things are the essence of landscape.’^[34]

Constable’s Royal Academy exhibits of the mid-1820s show that his focus now moved to new subjects. In 1824 his exhibition painting was A Boat Passing a Lock. The following year it was The Leaping Horse (1825). In 1826 he exhibited The Cornfield. This was followed in 1827 by the Chain Pier, Brighton and in 1828 with his new version of Dedham Vale. In these works there was no sign of Willy Lott’s house. It would appear that in the mid-1820s Flatford Mill and the ‘hundred yards of the Valley Farm’ faded into the background. Constable’s artistic concerns had shifted elsewhere, and these concerns were further fuelled by his wife’s disintegrating health. By 1828 it was hard to conceal the fact that Maria was suffering from consumption. His efforts to assist her through fresh air at Hamstead and Brighton were increasingly ineffective. By 1828 her health took a decided turn for the worse. On 2 January she gave birth to their seventh child, a son, Lionell Bicknell. By autumn Maria’s situation became grave and on 23 November 1828, she died. Constable was devastated by his wife’s death. CR Leslie tells us that from this day forth Constable never wore anything but mourning clothes. What made his wife’s death even harder to bear was the fact that he had never managed to achieve full RA status during her lifetime. This was made doubly ironic and painful when he was elected to become a Royal Academician on 10 February 1829, less than three months after her death.

In the wake of Maria’s death Constable leaned heavily on his friend John Fisher and his wife Mary. On 4 October 1828, hearing of Maria’s sad condition in a letter from Constable, Fisher wrote back, ‘I will come and see you soon. I fear your friendship makes you over-value the use I can be of to you; but what I can give, you shall have. Trial is the lot of life.’^[35] Hearing of Maria’s death Fisher wrote back instantly consoling his friend and encouraging him to apply himself rigidly to his profession. ‘Some of the finest works of art’, Fisher noted, ‘have been the results of periods of distress.’^[36] Fisher was at the Charterhouse in London on 11 February 1829, when Constable sent him a note informing him that he had been elected as Royal Academician the night before. Congratulating him for his achievement, which Fisher saw as the ‘triumph of real Art, over spurious Art’, and that of ‘patient moral integrity over bare chicanery and misrepresented worth.’^[37] He added, ‘Tomorrow I go with you & call upon your friends [his fellow Academicians]. The event is important to me, since my judgement was embarked in the same boat with your success.’^[38] Here Fisher was obviously referring to his early support of Constable and his purchase of both The White Horse and Stratford Mill (which Fisher presented to his lawyer John Tinney). It was also clear that Fisher saw Constable’s election as an RA as a moral triumph as well as an artistic achievement. As Constable’s closest friend, Fisher felt that he had accompanied him ‘in the same boat’ on his journey to his ultimate success.

Despite Fisher’s support, Constable seems to have been deeply depressed during the early months of 1829. Even Fisher’s visit does not seem to have cheered him very much. Instead, there was an apparent falling out, and Fisher may well have left unexpectedly. ‘Your sudden departure put me out a good deal and made me angry’, he wrote to Fisher on 23 April, ‘as well as you disappointed my friends in the Academy. Propitiate them on your return, and then you may leave me to myself.’^[39] Constable added that he had been ‘sadly ill when you left me’.^[40] Meanwhile he had been attempting to get a painting ready for the annual Royal Academy exhibition. He knew he would be under particular scrutiny this year as a provisional RA. In his 23 April letter to Fisher he wrote that he had ‘just got a letter from the Academy – the Pandemonium opens to the devils themselves on Saturday – in which they [are] allowed every excess for six days (Sunday excepted).’^[41] As for his works for the exhibition, he noted to Fisher, ‘I have sent the great Castle, such as it is – and a rich cottage.’^[42]

Constable had poured all his energy into a painting that was exhibited as Hadleigh Castle, his main exhibition work of 1829. Hadleigh Castle was a stormy painting that suited his mood in the wake of Maria’s death. It was painted in his later palette knife manner. The reviewer of The Athenaeum wrote on 27 May: ‘’Hadleigh Castle, the mouth of the Thames, Morning after a stormy Night’… is a picture which convicts the artist who executed it, of being a dangerous subject. The merits and beauties of this performance are such that it almost recommends a manner which the judgement pronounces to be faulty. But for this manner, indeed, the picture before us would be perfect, – so grand and picturesque, so free and so bold it is – so full of power and effect.’^[43]

 

 

48 Hadleigh Castle, 1829, 122 x 164.5 cm. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

 

 

It should be added that during the ‘varnishing days’ before the exhibition opened (which Constable referred to as the ‘pandemonium’), the sculptor Chantrey decided that the foreground of Constable’s painting was too cold and required toning-up. Taking Constable’s palette from him, he passed a strong glazing of asphaltum all over the foreground. Seeing this, Constable is recorded to have said, ‘There goes all my dew.’ In the time remaining Constable worked hard to take off this glazing to restore his painting to its previous condition.^[44]

The second work Constable exhibited in 1929 at his initiation exhibition presents us with an interesting problem. To start with we know very little about this painting, which was listed in the Royal Academy Exhibition Catalogue for that year only as ‘Landscape No. 9’. Constable had written to Fisher that it depicted a ‘rich cottage’. The Times noted in its review of 2 May that there was ‘a host of small pictures worthy of observation’ and included this work by Constable among them.^[45] We know from the exhibition catalogue that ‘Landscape No. 9’ was hung in the Great Room of the exhibition while Hadleigh Castle was hung in the School of Painting.

It seems that the small landscape with the ‘rich cottage’ that Constable sent to the Royal Academy in 1829 was The Study for the Valley Farm (Pl 49). That this painting differed in style and mood from Hadleigh Castle was noted by the reviewer of The Athenaeum who wrote on 20 May: ‘The Landscape No. 9, is one of the most powerful, brilliant, and happy of Mr. Constable’s productions. Nor is the manner of the artist… so strong and objectionable in this picture as in many which Mr. Constable has heretofore exhibited.’^[46]

 

 

49 Study for the Valley Farm (as in Pl 10), Exhibited as ‘Landscape No. 9’ in 1829, at the Royal Academy. Given to John Fisher, 9 August 1829, to commemorate their friendship. Now called the ‘Garter Painting’

 

 

This suggests that the painting was an earlier work. Moreover, it makes good sense that Constable wanted to be represented at his ‘initiation ceremony’ by a work that depicted his Suffolk roots – one of the scenes that had made him a painter. In fact, it is logical to argue that Constable, who was moving in new directions by the late 1820s, wanted to be represented at this important exhibition by both his earlier and newer modes of expression.

 

 

50a Sepia drawing of Maria on verso of The Study for the Valley Farm

 

 

 

50b Maria Constable, 1816, 30.3 x 25.1 cm. Tate Gallery, London

 

 

Finally, in his own strange way, Constable wanted Maria to be with him at the moment of his triumph. On the verso of The Study for the Valley Farm there is a very faint sepia sketch showing Maria with what may be John or Minna as an infant (Pl 50a). Constable had done a charming portrait of Maria in 1816 (Pl 50b) and there is a close parallel between this portrait and the sepia drawing

Here we need to consider the mounting body of evidence that ‘Landscape No. 9’ of the 1829 exhibition was in fact The Study for the Valley Farm on which he had worked into the mid-l820s and which he had ‘whipped up’ once more after his visit to the Beaumonts in 1823. The evidence for this conclusion is intriguing. In 1850, thirteen years after Constable’s death, Ramsey Richard Reinagle, who was an early friend with whom Constable later fell out, published a letter in the Literary Gazette in London in which he claimed to have painted a group of cattle expelling their breath on a Constable painting exhibited in the Great Room at the Royal Academy. Reinagle stated that Constable was an RA at the time that he exhibited the work with the changes Reinagle made.^[47] Scholars such as RB Beckett rejected Reinagle’s assertion as inaccurate and impossible since Constable was no longer Reinagle’s friend and he would not have had an opportunity to paint on one of Constable’s paintings after he became an RA.^[48]

 

 

51 Detail of third cow in The Study for the Valley Farm. The cow is shown expelling its breath

 

 

 

 

52 Detail of first cow in The Study for the Valley Farm

 

 

As I have noted elsewhere the Beckett conclusion is not necessarily correct.^[49] Neither CR Leslie nor the Constable family protested Reinagle’s statement in his 1850 letter, and in the 1829 exhibition a Reinagle painting hung only two spaces from Constable’s ‘Landscape No. 9’ in the Great Room, and two of Reinagle’s paintings flanked Hadleigh Castle in the Painting Academy.^[50] We know that Chantrey painted on Hadleigh Castle to Constable’s consternation as part of his ‘initiation’ at the Academy. It is equally possible that Reinagle painted on Constable’s cows in his Study for the Valley Farm (‘Landscape No. 9’) as part of the same process, at the event that Constable had feared as the ‘Pandemonium,’. What is intriguing in this regard is that the head of the third cow on Constable’s The Study for the Valley Farm is clearly expelling its breath (Pl 51) and is painted quite differently from the drawing beneath it. A careful study of the first cow (Pl 52) also shows that breath may have originally been indicated, but was later removed.

 

A second piece of evidence for The Study for the Valley Farm being the 1829 painting comes from the Constable-Fisher relationship. Whatever problems had arisen between the two men in early 1829, they seem to have quickly disappeared by the summer of that year. In July the archdeacon and his wife sent Constable an invitation to visit them and to bring the two oldest children, John and Minna.^[51] Constable had not been on an extended visit to Salisbury since 1821. He now decided to accept the Fishers’ invitation and arrived at the Cathedral Close on 7 July. Constable stayed in Salisbury until 28 July and, while his son, John, returned to London a few days later, Minna stayed on at the Fishers until the middle of November when Constable returned to Salisbury to pick her up. Meanwhile, on 9 August Fisher wrote to Constable in a letter containing a drawing that looks as if it was intended to function as a rebus (illustrated at the beginning of this paragraph): ‘Your case containing the [rebus] arrived just as I was leaving Salisbury. I just got a glympse of its agreeable surface, & came away. I accept of it with the greatest pleasure, as a mark of your friendship, & to my eye, the best specimen of your peculiar art. It is not every man who could have made such a thing a pleasing picture. I intend to hang it over the pianoforte in the first drawing room, under the Claude when it comes.’^[52]

For years Fisher’s rebus has troubled Constable scholars. Beckett wrote that it looked like a ‘horse shoe or a belt or a collar’, but he concluded that it ‘failed to convey his meaning’.^[53] As I have shown elsewhere, what we see in the rebus is a male garter of the type often used by 19th-century clergy and others to hold up their stockings. It was essentially a band with nubs that was tied by a ribbon or strings. Of course, the arrival of the case containing the ‘Garter’ held special significance for Fisher and Constable. With his reference to a ‘Garter’ Fisher was not speaking of the mundane everyday object we see in his drawing. The term ‘Garter’ also signified the Order of the Garter, regarded as the pinnacle of the British honours system. For Fisher, Constable’s election to the RA position was equivalent to receiving the ‘Garter’. As Fisher was well aware the Order of the Garter also symbolized the highest levels of chivalry and moral achievement in Great Britain. Fisher felt that Constable’s quest in his art had sought for similar moral truths in nature. This is precisely what he told Constable at the time of his election at the Academy.

What is clear from the foregoing is that Constable had sent Fisher a significant painting that Fisher admired as one of Constable’s best works. Fisher’s letter suggests that he was familiar with the development of this painting. ‘It is not every man’, he wrote, ‘who could have made such a thing a pleasing picture.’ In addition, he commented on the painting’s ‘appealing surface’, suggesting that what lay beneath may have been different. Moreover, he instantly associated it with his copy of Claude’s painting, Hagar and the Angel. The Claude was, in fact, back with Constable being refurbished at the time. The new painting Constable sent Fisher must have had a handsome frame because Fisher immediately ordered a new frame for the Claude which he wrote to Constable should be ‘handsome and about £ 5.’^[54] It also appears that Constable intended to spend more time at the Fishers later that autumn, for he had sent his ‘great easel’ to Salisbury and the Archdeacon confirmed its arrival. Fisher noted in his letter that he expected him to come to work on a painting he tentatively titled the ‘Church under a Cloud.’⁵⁶ On 3 September Fisher thanked Constable for some venison he had sent, along with the Claude and its new frame. In the same letter he wrote, ‘Your great boat looks nobly in the centre of the lesser Drawing room.’^[55] Fisher appears to have hung the Claude and the new painting as he had stated he would. The painting that Constable had sent him obviously included a boat further underscoring its relationship to The Study for the Valley Farm. We now know that the Garter Painting included a ‘rich cottage’ and a ‘boat.’ In giving Fisher this painting Constable no doubt remembered his statement earlier that year, that his ‘judgement’ was ‘embarked in the same boat with your success’. Now Constable countered by presenting him with the ‘very boat’ of his ‘success’. This was just the kind of exchange that Fisher and Constable enjoyed.

A third piece of indirect evidence for The Study for the Valley Farm as having been the 1829 painting comes from Constable’s habit in the late 1820s of sending paintings to the Birmingham Society of Arts Exhibition three years after they had been exhibited at the Royal Academy. In 1832 Constable sent to Birmingham a painting that has still to be identified that appeared in the Birmingham Society of Arts Exhibition as The Ferry.^[56] The room in which this painting was hung suggests that it, like ‘Landscape No. 9,’ was a smaller work. One need hardly emphasize that The Ferry would have been an appropriate title for The Study for the Valley Farm. There is some further evidence that ties The Study of the Valley Farm to the Fishers in the fall of 1829.

 

 

 

53a, 53b Details of line drawings of a child on Fisherton Mill (left, see Pl 54) and The Study for the Valley Farm (right, see Pl 10)

 

 

As the painting now shows there is a line drawing of a child below the woman in the doorway of Willy Lott’s house (Pl 53b). The closest Constable expression of a similarly drawn figure can be found in his pencil-and-watercolour sketch, Fisherton Mill (Reynolds II-P,730, 29.27) (Pl 54), which shows a child and a dog (Pl 53a).

 

 

54 Fisherton Mill, 19 November 1829, graphite and watercolour, 22.9 x 33.3 cm. British Museum

 

 

This drawing was made on 19 November 1829, while Constable was staying with the Fishers at Salisbury. It seems that even at the Fishers he could not refrain from working further on his painting and added the sketchy figure. Constable returned to London by the end of November.

While Constable improved considerably in health and mood in 1829, Fisher was becoming increasingly worried and troubled. Financial concerns now engulfed the Archdeacon. On 15 December, just a few weeks after Constable’s last visit, Fisher wrote him in London from Osmington on a delicate subject. Fisher needed money. In his letter he put it directly to his old friend: ‘Will it disturb you much’, he wrote, ‘if I ask you whether you can turn your two great pictures [The White Horse and a version of Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s Grounds] into money for me?’^[57] What Fisher hoped was that Constable could give him £200 against the paintings, either as an outright repurchase, or as a loan. In the past Constable had often borrowed money from Fisher, now the shoe was on the other foot.

We do not have the exact date of Constable’s reply to Fisher’s request, but it must have been written very close to Christmas Day of 1829, for on 29 December the Archdeacon thanked him for his ‘kind and friendly letter’ in which Constable assured him that he would buy back his paintings.^[58] Fisher was obviously in dire straits. There had been almost a complete breakdown in rents, he later explained. ‘I lost £400 in 1828 [and] £500 in 1829,’ he wrote, adding that the prospects for 1830 were no better: ‘My Gilligham farmers are ruined, seven of them are now breaking stones on the road!’^[59] He urged Constable to sell out of the funds as quickly as possible. ‘Not a day should be lost’, he warned, to raise the £200. ‘The funds are now higher than they will be again for a long time.’^[60] On Christmas Day, Constable could not help but think of his friend’s plight. At the same time his mind seems to have turned to the paintings he associated with Fisher, particularly The White Horse and his most recent gift, The Study for the Valley Farm, for on the evening of Christmas Day he did a curious thing. He produced a small drawing of Willy Lott’s house (Pl 55) – his first return to this subject in nearly a decade. (Reynolds II-P, 758, 29.55) The drawing combined elements of Fisher’s two paintings.

 

 

55 The Farmhouse by a River, 25 December 1829. Pencil, 18.4 x 22.2 cm. British Museum

 

 

In composing this picture, Constable must have let his mind wander over the years of their relationship. Fisher had been so important as a supporter when he first attempted to produce his six-foot paintings of his native Suffolk scenery. For Constable The White Horse had become almost synonymous with the Archdeacon. How often he had borrowed the painting from Fisher to show elsewhere. How tolerant Fisher had been when he had sent the work abroad without even informing him.^[61] The drawing Constable produced is interesting not only for the way it combines the subjects of Fisher’s paintings, but the way in which Constable memorized scenes and their component parts. In producing his sketch, which was clearly a construct, Constable went back to the White Horse of 1819 and also to The Banks of the Stour of 1812, recalling both its boat and the vegetation next to it

Fisher’s last invitation to Constable was, ‘Prithee come – life is short – friendship is sweet.’^[62] How short, even Fisher could not have known in 1829. The correspondence indicates that after Fisher’s financial crisis their relationship changed. Over the next two years Constable and Archdeacon moved in different directions. From 1829 to 1833 Constable became increasingly absorbed in his ill-fated quest to publish the English Landscape. For Constable this effort to reproduce his works in mezzotint form proved troubling and a major disappointment. Much of his time became absorbed in directing his engraver David Lucas in his work. By May of 1830 he already complained that his new duties forced him to ‘neglect almost everything and everybody’. ‘Most of all’, he wrote to Fisher, ‘I have regretted the correspondence which we used to hold with each other. Time and events – and moral duties – and all the sad vicissitudes and concerns of life – have grievously usurped it place.’ Constable added that he felt ‘bereaved’ by these circumstances^.[63]

Constable’s own mood remained sombre. He was increasingly critical of his own work. ‘My wood is liked [Helmingham Dell exhibited in 1830] but I suffer for want of that little completion which you always feel the regret of – and you are quite right,’ he wrote to Fisher on 24 May 1830.^[64] ‘I have filled my head with certain notions of freshness – sparkle – brightness – till it has influenced my practice in no small degree, and is in fact taking the place of truth so invidious is manner, in all things – it is a species of self worship – which should always be combated – and we have nature (another world for moral feeling) always in our reach to do it with – if we will have the resolution to look at her.’^[65] Fisher’s response which was written more than a month later was equally self-critical, he apologized for his ‘neglect’ and the long ‘unanswered letter’. ‘But I have been Ill’, he added, ‘very ill… and I suspect that both intellects and life were in danger.’^[66] In a more optimistic letter of 6 July 1830 Fisher still toyed with the idea of repossessing the paintings that Constable had bought back from him. Constable’s answered immediately on the 7th to encourage his friend. Three days later he rushed off to Windsor to see Fisher for a few hours, writing in a hasty note to his son that Fisher had ‘been so very ill – and has got well.’^[67]

 

 

56 A Farmhouse Near the Water’s Edge, 1832. Watercolour, 14.5 x 19.6 cm. British Museum

 

 

The reality however was that Fisher had not gotten well. By 1831 their correspondence seems to have ceased for there are no further letters that have been preserved. This is odd since Constable’s 1831 Royal Academy painting was Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, a work that was closely identified with the Archdeacon, and had been started as the ‘Church under a Cloud’ two years earlier, with Fisher’s support. By 1832 the situation was no better. If there were letters for this year none has survived. Constable himself was not well at the end of 1831 and into the early months of 1832. While he showed some sign of improvement by summer, the same was not true of Fisher. Constable was aware that the family was clearly worried about him. The problem lay not only in Fisher’s physical condition, but also in his mental state. Again there are some visual clues that Constable must have been thinking of his friend, for in 1832 he produced a finished watercolour drawing of the scene, A Farmhouse near the Water’s Edge (Reynolds II-P, 827, 32.17) (Pl 56) that he had started in 1829.^[68]

 

 

 

57 Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, 19 July 1832. Watercolour, 28.5 x 23.5 cm.
Henry Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino

 

 

Then on 19 July 1832 he produced a watercolour drawing of Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows (Reynolds II-P, 833, 32.19) (Pl 57). The latter was done in an album, and may indicate a last quick trip to Salisbury to see his friend. Such a journey may have been spurred by Mary Fisher’s concerns, and the decision that she and the family made to take the Archdeacon to France in August, hoping that a change of scenery would improve his mood and physical condition. If the Ferry exhibited at the Birmingham Society of Arts exhibition in the fall of 1832 was, in fact, the Study for the Valley Farm, as now seems likely, Constable had an additional reason for making his quick trip to Salisbury. For, unlike the White Horse, which was back in his studio, the Study for the Valley Farm was still at the Fishers’ house. As the Birmingham exhibition was scheduled to open on 3 September such a trip may well have been in order, particularly since Constable seems to have been aware of the Fisher’s plans to leave England for the Continent in August.^[69]

If Constable did see Fisher in July, it was their last meeting. On 31 August he received a black-edged letter from the Archdeacon’s sister Mary announcing his death in France on the 25th. Constable was deeply moved by Fisher’s death. He wrote to Leslie early in September: ‘You will be grieved to hear that I have lost my dear friend Archdeacon Fisher. He went with Mrs. Fisher to Boulogne, hoping to find some relief from a state of long and severe suffering both mental and bodily – he was benefited at first, began to take an interest in what was about him & poor dear Mrs. Fisher was cheered with the prospect of his being speedily restored to health and spirits – when on Friday August 24 – he was seized with violent spasms and dead on the afternoon of Saturday the 25th.’^[70] Fisher was not yet forty-six. Constable lamented to Leslie, ‘We loved each other and confided in each other entirely – and his loss makes a sad gap in my life… I cannot tell [you] how singularly his death has affected me.’^[71] Three months later, on 2 November, Johnny Dunthorne, his former studio assistant who had been like a son to him, died of heart failure. He was not yet thirty-five. Constable noted to Leslie, ‘I am unfortunate in my friendships.’^[72]

Fisher’s death meant that his widow would have to move out of Leydenhall, the Fishers’ home in the Close of Salisbury Cathedral. Constable knew that Mary would need funds. On 30 September he wrote her: ‘… about the pictures? I shall, as you know, be glad to be of any service, and if sending them to Charlotte Street will be an accommodation, I will clear a room for them. Some of them I am anxious about and will gladly take them at a valuation, rather than they should be dispersed.’^[73] Whether Constable proposed to Mary Fisher to buy back the Study for the Valley Farm at this time is not clear. The painting was at the Birmingham exhibition when this letter was written. We do know, however, that Constable made her an offer of £20 for the painting and that she decided to give the work back to him rather than sell it to him. The evidence for this comes from an inquiry that Constable’s son, John Charles, made a year after his father’s death on 31 March 1837. In April 1838 John J. was preparing for his father’s sale at Foster & Sons auction house in London. He was concerned about the ownership of the painting which he and Minna knew had been given to the Fishers by their father in 1829. John would not have raised this question had the painting not been in his father’s studio at the time of his death. On 29 April 1838,^[74] Mary Fisher wrote: ‘When your dear father expressed a great wish to repossess that picture, as having a particularly strong attachment to it on account of its being one of his earliest productions and representing a favourite subject, he offered to purchase it for twenty pounds… I was glad of an opportunity of obliging a friend for whom I felt such an esteem and I therefore declined selling him the picture but begged him to accept it. Thus you see dear John it is as much yours as any other of his possessions.’^[75]

Constable’s desire to have the study back involved more than the fact that it was an early painting of a favourite subject. He was casting about for an idea that could become another major work. To some degree he had never finished with his upright conception of Willy Lott’s house. As his 1829 drawing and 1832 watercolour indicated, he was returning to the Valley Farm motif. Fisher had regarded The Study for the Valley Farm as the ‘best specimen of your peculiar art’. In short, he valued it even more highly than the White Horse. Already in 1829 Fisher had urged him to reach within himself for another great painting. ‘I yearn to see you tranquilly and collectively at work on your next great picture’, he had written, ‘I long to see you do, what you are fully capable of, “touch the top of English Art”. To put forth your power in a finished polished picture, which shall be the wonder and the imitation-struggle of this and future ages.’^[76] The deaths of Fisher and Dunthorne appear to have pulled him back to his Suffolk scenes. If there was a great painting left in him he would have to find its materials there. Besides, Fisher and Dunthorn deserved a memorial. What could be more appropriate in either case than the Valley Farm?

With The Study for the Valley Farm’s return from Birmingham in early December, Constable proceeded with his plans. On 9 December 1832, eight days after the closing of the Birmingham exhibition, he sent his engraver David Lucas several paintings. One of these was of Old Billy Lott’s house. Constable wrote to Lucas that Henry Howard ‘is much pleased with Old Billy Lott’s House – so am I’. A few sentences later he told him: ‘You may square Old Billy Lott’s as soon as you please.’^[77] Beckett and other Constable scholars such as Leslie Parris have concluded that the squaring referred to here involved the framing lines on a mezzotint of Willy Lott’s house that Lucas was preparing, but this is unlikely.^[78] Lucas had, in fact, taken on certain studio chores for Constable by 1832 and it is very likely that what Constable was referring to in his letter was the standard transferring of an image from one canvas to another.

Constable’s hope of finding himself again a large painting was still clearly visible in 1833 when he wrote to Leslie that at the ‘age of 56’ it was time to begin to know oneself. He added that he increasingly knew what ‘I am not’, but that he was still in hope: ‘I may yet make some impression with my ‘light’ – my ‘dews’ – my ‘breezes’ – my bloom and my freshness – no one of which qualities has yet been perfected on the canvas of any painter in this world.’^[79] Just as he had stepped back in the past in order to move forward, so Constable now reconsidered older ideas. In 1833 he went back to his visit to Coleorton and the drawings made at the Beaumonts, to attempt a new composition called the Cenotaph, but he was not pleased with the results and temporarily abandoned the project. A commission of a country house, a subject he usually disdained, led to his main exhibition piece of1833, Englefield House, but when compared to his earlier representations of Wivenhoe Park, or Malvern Hall, this painting was also a failure. One of his smaller exhibition pieces of 1833 was The Cottage in A Cornfield (Reynolds II-P, 868, 33.3) (Pl 58). This work is of interest because it shows Constable going back to a subject he had produced earlier and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1817 (Reynolds II-P, 1, 17.2) (Pl 59). His 1833 repainting of this work is of further interest in that it also shows him going back to the brush, rather than the palette knife. Still this painting reveals, as a comparison with the earlier work shows, that it was difficult for Constable to recreate his links with the past. The major difference in both compositions focuses on a subtle relationship to nature that Constable found almost impossible to restore. The veined and gnarled trees at the right of his later composition stand in distinct contrast to his earlier trees and foliage.

 

 

58 The Cottage in a Cornfield, 1833, 62 x 51.5 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London

 

 

 

59 A Cottage in a Cornfield, 1817, 31.5 x 26.5 cm. Amgueddfa Cymru / Museum Wales

 

 

The trees in much of his late work seem to symbolize the scarred painter himself. These are not the natural trees of his youth, they are trees in the process of dying. Instead of fresh breezes blowing through them, they are desiccated by life’s storms. Even their tonality is changing. The green of youth is turning into the brown of old age. How different these trees are from those produced by the painter who had challenged Sir George Beaumont’s notion that a good painting should be the colour of a ‘cremona fiddle’ by placing the same fiddle on the green grass of his lawn.^[80]

While Constable was bent on painting one last great work of ‘dewy freshness’ in which he sought to restore his relationship to nature, the great love that had permeated his youth, he found it increasingly difficult to do so. Giving up the palette knife for the brush as a way of propitiating his muse was far easier than restoring the spiritual core of the experience that had once united him to the scenes of his Suffolk upbringing. On 16 August 1833 he wrote to Leslie, ‘What beautiful silvery clouds are rolling about today!!!’ At the same time he added on a more melancholy note, ‘I am daily bereft of some friend or other. “The world is left to darkness and to me”.’ ‘I can hardly write, for looking at the silvery clouds, and skies. How I sigh for that peace (to paint them) which this world cannot give – at least to me.’^[81]

As the Valley Farm was to show, the bond that had tied him to nature had, in fact, been broken. While he could still admire the beauty of the landscape through which he passed, as he did at Arundel in 1834 , writing, ‘I never saw such beauty in natural landscape before,’ and hoped that it could ‘influence what I may do in the future’,^[82] the reality was that the gap between what he saw and what he could paint was now too great.

In preparing for the English Landscape Constable had written the following about his art. ‘In art, as in literature there are two modes by which men aim at distinction; in the one the Artist by careful application to what others have accomplished, imitates their works, or selects and combines their various beauties; in the other he seeks excellence at its primitive source nature. The one forms a style upon the study of pictures, and produces either imitative or eclectic art, as it has been termed; the other by a close observation of nature discovers qualities existing in her, which have never been portrayed before, and thus forms a style which is original.’ The first mode, he added, was easily comprehensible to the public because it dealt with the familiar. The second was not, because there were no guidelines for how ‘originality should be judged’.^[83] As Constable’s analysis reveals the study of nature was the source of all original painting.

Constable obviously developed this analysis on the basis of his own experience. Years earlier he had written to Fisher, ‘But I should paint my own places best – Painting is but another word for feeling. I associate my “careless boyhood” to all that lies on the banks of the Stour. They made me a painter (& I am grateful) that is I had often thought of pictures of them before I had ever touched a pencil, and your picture [The White Horse] is one of the strongest instances I can recollect of it.’^[84] For Constable, the real painter had to be dedicated to the natural scene; he had to know it and experience it in all its component parts. His feelings about a scene were the product of a dialogue that combined his own inner reality with the outside world. But nature, the source of his study, was clearly the dominant component. His rejection of the Lenox Valley Farm was precisely because it violated this principle. In producing this work he had taken the imitative approach. This had violated his rules for original art. As he later explained it had taken him 20 years to understand this difference.

To express nature in an original way, one had to be able to feel and absorb it. The subject and object had to be in a harmonious dialogue with one another. The greatness of his early works rested in his ability to achieve this goal. But by the 1830s this bond was largely broken. The intellect was still there, he could appreciate the natural phenomena, as his eyes perceived them, but it was precisely the feelings with which he identified the moral interpretation of the scene, and through which he painted, that had deserted him. Perhaps no aspect of his paintings reflected this more than the trees he so loved as a young man which now became mere hulks of their former selves. The tragedy was that by the 1830s Constable’s feelings were no longer in sympathy with the landscape he was painting. Rather than being externally derived from nature, his feelings now turned inwards. In essence, Constable’s paintings after Maria’s death were neither naturalistic, nor impressionistic. They were essentially expressionistic. As the trees of his late paintings reveal, his feelings were imposed on the landscape, not derived from it. In 1834 he wrote to Leslie that he saw his problem as having preferred the ‘picturesque’ to the ‘ beautiful’.^[85] To some degree this analysis was correct, for the picturesque was precisely a determined style known through other pictures. As he himself admitted he had deserted originality and ‘truth’ for a mannered style. This he realized was ‘self-worship’, which he always associated with moral failure.^[86]

While Constable’s style in the early 1820s has been identified as a source of Impressionism, particularly his use of broken colours in the Hay Wain that so impressed the French Salon of 1824, it has often been noted that his later style (and paintings) failed to have a similar impact on the continental artistic community. Many art historians have observed that Constable’s immediate influence on continental art was brief. When, in the wake of his 1824 triumph, he sent The Cornfield to France in 1827 it was hardly noticed. Constable himself seems to have been surprised by the response. Yet, it should be added, that by the late 1820s and 1830s his style was moving in completely new directions. His use of broken colours could help French painters to establish a new relationship with nature, as they did in 1824, leading them to follow his path from the studio to the plein-air world, but it could also lead, as his late work demonstrated, away from such a direct natural relationship to one in which the painter’s feeling and emotions were imposed on the natural scene. In this sense the late Constable had more in common with German expressionists than with French impressionists.

Expressionism, as an art form, is often associated with periods of intense social change and spiritual crisis. Given the environment of Britain in the 1820s and 1830s, and Constable’s own personal state, it is hardly surprising that he should have expressed such tendencies. Constable’s earlier naturalism had been moulded by the remnants of Britain’s romantic age. But this age was coming to a close with industrialization, foreclosures, and the social turmoil that led to the Reform Bill. Even Constable, as his letters indicate, was concerned about the ‘dark side of the landscape’, as some have called it, that was now emerging. Rural poverty, an unhappy and unruly countryside, widespread arson, all these were increasingly common in Suffolk as well as elsewhere in the British countryside.^[87] Constable’s paintings, such as his Dedham Vale of 1828, show that he was aware of the problem. If industrialization cut down trees for railroads, destroying the groves he loved, it was also seriously altering the human dimension of the countryside. For Constable, in an emotional sense, the sunlight of Suffolk was darkening, just as the sunlight of his personal life went out with Maria’s death. Fisher’s financial crisis and death further underscored the instability of the world in which he lived.

At the same time, Constable experienced his own inner spiritual crisis. Like Wordsworth, he had sought divinity in nature. His earlier studies were in essence a part of this spiritual quest. Landscape was not only his ‘mistress’ it was his tabernacle. Painting was a sacred act. As Constable viewed it, the painter was a kind of minister revealing the divine through his work. This is why he had to be an ‘inward man’. But by the 1830s the well­spring of his painting no longer looked to nature; as he himself recognized, his new work was beset with the ‘continual storms’ of his subjective personal experience. Instead of concentrating on the outside world, he became increasingly preoccupied with his inner self. He simply could not find the ‘peace’ needed to restore his relationship to nature. Somehow the reality of the natural world whose mysteries he had sought to penetrate as a ‘natural painter’ was no longer open to him. On the other hand, Constable never felt comfortable with his form of expressionism; nor, one might add, did his public and the critics. Many of the latter castigated him for perverting his true talent for landscape. He often criticized himself, once observing that he had ‘cut his throat’ with the ‘palette knife’. Constable’s moods were also increasingly bleak. Somehow, he felt he had been expelled from the garden. And yet, he needed to paint. In 1834 he wrote to Leslie while working on the Valley Farm: ‘Though my life and occupation is useless, still I trifle on in a way that seems to myself like an occupation, and the delusion… still keeps me going, and my canvas soothes me into a forgetfulness of the scenes of turmoil and folly – and worse – of the scene around me.’ In the same letter he added, ‘Every gleam of sunshine is blighted to me in the art at least. Can it therefore be wondered at that I paint continual storms? “Tempest o’er tempest rolled” – still the “darkness” is majestic, I have not to accuse myself of ever having prostituted the moral feeling of art, but have always done my best.’^[88] And yet, as even he must have known, the ‘moral feeling’ of his art was now radically different from what it had once been.

In 1836 Constable delivered a lecture on landscape at the Royal Institution in London. In speaking of his favourite painter, Claude Lorrain, he noted that in the early Claude ‘all is lovely – all amiable – all is amenity and repose; the calm sunshine of the heart’.^[89] But even for the great Claude the later years were different. Commenting on his late works Constable pointed out that they were often ‘cold, heavy, and dark’. While some of his late paintings retained a quality that Constable called ‘majestic’, he thought that Claude tried through ‘grandeur of subject and conception’ to make up for the loss of ‘excellence which, in the decline of life, and in the absence of his former habits of incessant observation of nature, was now departing from him’.^[90] The dilemma that Constable identified with the aging Claude was, of course, precisely his own.

By the 1830s the reality was that Constable, like Claude, had abandoned his habit of ‘incessant observation of nature’. Nature was no longer the teacher, it was the subject to be exploited by his moods. While he wanted to return to the ‘calm sunshine of the heart’, he remained in the grip of his ‘storms’. Where this road would lead was already apparent in his Farmhouse Near the Water’s Edge, his last attempt at the Valley Farm theme, and a painting he seems to have originally considered as a memorial to the Archdeacon. In 1834, he painted three oil studies of this subject Pl 60, Pl 61, Pl 62).^[91]

 

 

60 A Farmhouse near the Water’s Edge, 1834, 25.4 x 34.9 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London

 

 

 

 

61 On the Stour: A Farmhouse near the Water’s Edge, 1834, 62 x 79 cm. Phillips Collection, Washington DC

 

 

 

 

62 A Farmhouse near the Water’s Edge, 1834, 65 x 85 cm. University of California, Los Angeles, Frederick S. Wight Art Gallery

 

 

Whether he intended to produce a larger work from them is not clear, but the fact that he wrestled again and again with the motif shows that he must have considered such a possibility. On 8 September 1834 he wrote to Leslie, ‘I have almost determined to attack another canal for my large frame.’^[92] On the other hand, as these works progressively demonstrate, his vision of the Valley Farm was failing. As expressionist works they may have ‘soothed his feelings’ and served to alleviate his pain, but they had almost nothing to do with the scenes of his youth. Nor could he carry them to completion. When we compare them with Constable’s sketches for the White Horse, Stratford Mill and the Hay Wain done more than a decade earlier, we can see the distance that now separated him from his earlier vision. What hopes he had for the Farmhouse Near the Water’s Edge as a tribute to his friend, John Fisher, were soon abandoned.

This brings us to the final painting of The Valley Farm itself (Pl 63). Because we now have the The Study for the Valley Farm we can judge more clearly the changes that Constable went through in his last years. In 1829 the reviewers of his earlier work had written of the study as ‘one of the most powerful, brilliant, and happy’ of his works. Fisher had echoed the same sentiments by calling it the ‘best specimen’ of his ‘peculiar art’, and had further paid him the ultimate compliment of hanging it with Claude’s Hagar and the Angel. It seems that Constable now made up his mind that this subject would become his tribute not only to the Archdeacon but to Johnny Dunthorne.

The painting he had given to Fisher was clearly a Fisher favourite. Constable had himself tied it to Fisher’s statement that the Archdeacon’s judgement had ridden with him in the same boat that had taken him to his success. In fact, the two men in the boat together, was precisely the theme Constable toyed with in the Farmhouse Near the Water’s Edge. At the same time, the Valley Farm was also closely associated with Johnny Dunthorne. Johnny had entered Constable’s studio as a young man of sixteen in the early months of 1814 as Constable worked on his first large picture of Willy Lott’s house, The Ferry, which he exhibited at the Royal Academy that spring. He was also tied to the Hay Wain, having sent Constable a drawing of the harvest scarve, or wagon, he incorporated into that painting. It appears that Constable wanted something of Johnny’s in the new work and remembered his drawings of ash trees in East Bergholt. On 14 February 1835, he wrote to Johnny’s father, John Dunthorne Senior, asking him to lend him ‘two or three of poor John’s studies of the ashes in the town meadow, and a study of plants that grew in the lane below Mr. Coleman’s, near the spouts which ran into the pond’.^[93]

If John Dunthorne sent him his son’s drawings, there is no evidence that they were incorporated into the final painting. Constable’s trees, as The Valley Farm reveals, were increasingly alienated from those he had drawn earlier. It must have become quickly obvious to him that Johnny’s ash trees could not survive in the new painting. Nothing is more intriguing, in fact, than the way in which the ash tree in The Study for the Valley Farm, with its lovely romantic tuning-fork lines that echoed Claude’s Hagar and the Angel, was transformed in the final painting into the veined and suffering, almost leafless, and certainly lifeless, form that now stands at the right of Constable’s 1835 work. Johnny’s trees were the trees of youth, as were those in his own Study for the Valley Farm; these were the trees of an ill and world-weary painter, the desiccated symbols of pain, disappointment, and old age.

While Constable seems to have struggled with his painting in 1833 and 1834, as he did with much of his late work, it is hard to trace The Valley Farm’s progress during these years. His painting was often interrupted by illness, depression, and the need to look after his children. There were stretches of time when he could not paint at all. He also appears to have lacked the concentration to carry the work forward. In the summer of 1833 he visited his brother and sister at Flatford Mill and spent some time in sight of Old Billy Lott’s house with his children, but despite his proximity to the subject he appears to have lacked the inclination to make new drawings or sketches of the house. How little the actual scene now seems to have meant to him! By the end of the year he informed his friend George Constable of Arundel that he had been ‘sadly ill’, but now ‘ventured to embark on a large canvas, and thus set forth on a sea of troubles’. He added that he had ‘chosen a rich subject’.^[94] ‘Rich’ is a word that Constable appears to have associated with The Valley Farm. When he sent The Study for the Valley Farm to the 1829 Royal Academy Exhibition as ‘Landscape No. 9’, he had described the work to Fisher as a ‘rich cottage’.^[95] Later he stated that he was ‘making a rich plumb pudding’ of his painting.^[96] That he was at work on the painting by early 1834 is indicated in his letter to Leslie at West Point, in which he stated that he was depressed and hardly able ‘to do any one thing’, although he added that he was back at work on his ‘large canvas’. As this letter indicated, however it was clear that his ‘sea of troubles’ had not been calmed.

The reality was that by 1835 Constable had immense difficulty in painting. To what degree his difficulties were attributable to his physical condition needs to be explored further. In many ways he was effectively crippled by his rheumatic and arthritic condition. He was losing the dexterity that a painter required. But the problem was also emotional as well as physical. Working on The Valley Farm does not appear to have provided him the sense of solace he found in painting Hadleigh Castle. Expressionism now seemed to be failing him. The pain remained, but the subject was not improved by it, no matter how hard he worked. Somehow, he could neither lose nor find himself in this work. By the spring of 1835 Constable had been painting the Valley Farm for nearly two years. Yet in March he wrote to Leslie, ‘My picture must go [to the exhibition] – but it is woefully deficient in paint in places.’^[97] It is hard to understand what Constable meant by this statement, when one looks and the densely layered surface of the work in the Tate today (Pl 63). ‘Deficient in paint’, in this instance, seems to have meant that the work was somehow not right.

 

 

63 The Valley Farm, 1835, 147.3 x 125.1 cm. Tate Britain, London

 

 

When Robert Vernon, the wealthy collector who had made his money procuring horses for the British Army during the Napoleonic wars, decided to buy The Valley Farm for £300 before it went to the Royal Academy Exhibition in 1835, Constable felt cheered, writing to Leslie that he was still in a ‘devil of a funk’ about the work, but that he now ‘liked it’ and was ‘confidant’.^[98] To George Constable he reported, ‘I have got my picture into a very beautiful state. I have kept my brightness without my spottiness, and I have preserved God Almighty’s daylight.’^[99] And yet, here too, one wonders what Constable was referring to. The Valley Farm contains hardly any of the Suffolk ‘sunlight’ for which his earlier work was renowned. The sky with its clouds has become heavy. One critic later commented that it reminded him ‘of the tossing about of the stuffings of pack saddles among the remnants of blue taffeta’.^[100] The sunlight, where it breaks through, is oddly focused. The water that once sparkled as it flowed along the Mill Stream seems motionless and congealed. A recent author has compared it to ‘gelatin’^[101] in which the ferry is stuck, while a contemporary critic wrote of it as ‘ditch water’.^[102]

Stuck is, in fact, the right word for much of the picture. The useful productive relationship between man and nature, which was depicted in so many of his earlier landscapes, has here been frozen in time, literally stuck motionless in place. The house towers over the middle of the composition, but it is not the cheerful home of Willy Lott depicted in the Hay Wain and in his Study for the Valley Farm, but a decaying structure. The air now seems devoid of breezes. There is hardly any green left to the grass and foliage. The trees are in essence the ‘brown trees’ he so despised in dirty old paintings, and the colouring, despite Charles Rhyne’s effort to suggest that it was once brighter, is close to monochromatic. Rather than sparkling and fresh in its dews, this work is profoundly sombre and dark. One cannot help but wonder about Vernon’s taste in buying the painting from a studio that still contained the White Horse and The Corn Field – not to mention dozens of other paintings in his earlier style.

In his biography of Constable, Leslie wrote that The Valley Farm ‘had the rare luck, when exhibited, of pleasing even some of the newspaper critics’.^[103] One suspects that what Leslie was mixing up here was the critics response to the smaller version of the subject exhibited in 1829 as ‘Landscape No. 9.’ As noted above that work was praised as ‘one of the most powerful, brilliant, and happy of Mr. Constable’s productions’.^[104] In 1835 the press, as Judy Crosby Ivy has shown, was almost unanimous in its negative response to the final painting.^[105] Some thought the subject ‘pleasing’, but castigated the work for its ‘bizarre effect’.^[106] Quite a few shared the view of The Spectator whose columnist wrote, ‘Constable has spoiled a charming rustic scene, “The Valley Farm”, by showing it (as usual) as if a shower of sleet were falling from a summer sky. He prefers his mannerism to his fame.’^[107] Many critics expressed difficulty in coming to terms with Constable’s expressionistic style and complained bitterly about the destruction of his talent for landscape – ‘a talent, which he has, through some flaw in his cranium, been so diligent to render ridiculous’.^[108]

Constable’s own dissatisfaction with the painting was only too apparent in the months after the exhibition. Instead of sending the work to its owner, Vernon, he attempted to repaint it. This took much of the rest of the year. In October he wrote to a friend that he had been hard at work on his painting, ‘oiling out, making out, polishing, scraping’, with the results that it was much improved. ‘The “sleet and snow” have disappeared’, he wrote, ‘leaving in their places, silver, ivory, and a little gold.’^[109] By December Constable was genuinely proud of the results, and invited Leslie to come and ‘look at Mr. Vernon’s picture by daylight’. ‘I want you, of all things, to see my picture now, for it has proved to me what my art is capable of when time can be given sufficient to carry it home.’^[110] Ten days later he was still working on the painting and wrote to Leslie that Vernon had begun ‘fidgeting’ about getting it, but that he intended to do ‘as I like with it, for I have a greater interest in it than anybody else’.^[111]

What Constable’s activity demonstrated was his determination to restore some element of life to his work. With the older painting staring at him from the walls of his gallery, he must have been haunted by the qualities of The Study for the Valley Farm and his earlier execution of the scene. Dedicated, as the new painting was, to his good friends John Fisher and Johnny Dunthorne, he must have wanted the work to meet with their approval. But above all, he wanted it to meet with his own approval. When Vernon asked him whether the painting had been painted for any particular person, he replied instantly. ‘Yes sir, it was painted for a very particular person for whom I have painted all my life.’^[112] What is tragic is how far Constable’s personal analysis of his work now differed from reality. His constant reworking does not seem to have enhanced the painting. His ‘rich plum pudding’ simply became heavier and heavier. Here Constable made the mistake that his friend Henry Trimmer said was his greatest fault, he mistook ‘alteration for improvement’.^[113] Regrettably, the painting he produced had almost none of the qualities he saw in it. What this illustrated was that having lost its strong grounding in nature, Constable’s painting now became subject to his own inner delusions that were increasingly divorced from natural reality.

Contemporary reviewers of a painter’s works are often wrong. Constable was quite right when he argued that the original painter could not be understood in his day. History, he felt, would vindicate artists who were unappreciated in their time. He no doubt thought of himself in coming to such conclusions. But, unfortunately, history has not vindicated The Valley Farm, and Constable’s high estimation of his work has not been shared by later generations. As Leslie Parris and Ian Fleming-Williams wrote in their monumental Tate Gallery catalogue of 1991, ‘The Valley Farm has not received a good press, either in the artist’s own day or recently.’^[114] Over the years the evaluation of this painting has, in fact, become increasingly negative. Most Constable scholars now see The Valley Farm as a disturbing and idiosyncratic work. Writing in 1965, Graham Reynolds believed that Constable had lost his normal feelings of ‘immediate contact with nature’ in this work.^[115] By 1969 Conal Shields and Leslie Parris were less generous. They suggested the painting was a ‘sinister object’ and its figures the product of a ‘bad, bad dream’.^[116] Even a distant relative, such as Freda Constable, writing in 1975, was inclined to be circumspect in her evaluation. She observed that in The Valley Farm Constable was looking ‘backwards at the scenes of his boyhood’. ‘But’, she noted, ‘how they have changed! … The water looks slow and lifeless, the countryside is not purposefully at work, the farm house [is] more a picturesque ruin in the making than a busy home… The trees he loved so much are not growing in the air and light but decaying in a motionless dank gloom, house martins [still] skim the water, but silently.’ ‘It is an unhealthy picture’, she concluded, ‘far more oppressive than Hadleigh Castle.’^[117] By 1985, David Hill wrote in his Constable’s English Landscape Scenery, ‘The Stour had become the Styx, and the girl in the boat is being taken to a rambling house where a dark figure waits at the gate. If Constable discovered anything about his relationship to the past in painting this picture, it must have been that it was long dead.’^[118]

What The Valley Farm poignantly showed was that by 1835 the ‘calm sunshine of the heart’, the essence of Constable’s greatness, was gone and could not be restored. Left with his ‘storms’ he painted on for two more years until his death in 1837, but the journey that had begun with Willy Lott’s house in 1802, and had led to his greatest triumphs, The White Horse and The Hay Wain, came to a bitter end with this painting. By the 1830s it was obvious that neither Constable, nor England, could turn the clock back to recapture the vision of a countryside that was clearly lost.

 

 

 

 

Abbreviations in the notes

 

JCCI Beckett, R.B., ed. John Constable’s Correspondence I: The Family at East Bergholt, (Ipswich: Suffolk Record Society, 1962, revised and reprinted 1976).

JCCII Beckett, R.B., ed. John Constable’s Correspondence II: Early Friends and Maria Bicknell (Mrs. Constable) (Ipswich: Suffolk Record Society, 1964).

JCC III Beckett, R.B., ed. John Constable’s Correspondence 111: The Correspondence with C.R. Leslie (Ipswich: Suffolk Record Society, 1965).

JCCIV Beckett, R.B., ed. John Constable’s Correspondence IV- Patrons, Dealers, and Fellow Artists (Ipswich: Suffolk Record Society, 1966).

JCCV Beckett, R.B., ed. John Constable’s Correspondence V- Various Friends, with Charles Boner and the Artist’s Children (Ipswich: Suffolk Record Society, 1967).

JCC VI Beckett, R.B., ed. John Constable’s Correspondence VI: The Fishers (Ipswich: Suffolk Record Society, 1968).

J JCFDC Parris, Leslie; Shields, Conal; Fleming-Williams, Ian, eds., John Constable: Further Documents and Correspondence (London and Ipswich: Tate Gallery and Suffolk Record Society, 1975).

Reynolds I-P Reynolds, Graham. The Early Paintings and Drawings of John Constable, Plates, New Haven 1996

Reynolds I-T Reynolds, Graham. The Early Paintings and Drawings of John Constable, Text, New Haven 1996

Reynolds II-P Reynolds, Graham. The Later Paintings and Drawings of John Constable, Plates, New Haven 1984

Reynolds II-T Reynolds, Graham. The Later Paintings and Drawings of John Constable, Text, New Haven 1984

CD Beckett, R.B., ed. John Constable’s Discourses, Ipswich: Suffolk Record Society, 1970

 

 

 

 

1 JCC V, p47. Jennings wrote on 22 December 1835, ‘I should like to see the hundred yards of the Valley Farm!’ ↑

2 JCC V, p48. ↑

3 Michael Rosenthal has defined the ‘georgic’ as ‘a social poetry, founded in a rural [English] society in which all worked for the common good, and which divided workers into those who laboured, and those who dictated, their common ‘industry’ directed to the shared end of national advancement and glory decided on by the latter. In the agricultural context, labour tended the landscape to produce wealth in the form of crops which, when traded, funded the cities, thriving with commerce and arts, which de-noted a healthy civilization. There was a chain of causation linking the ploughman with what his labour ultimately produced; thus to break the chain would jeopardise society. Consequently the georgic had also a moral aspect, exalting such social virtues as Industry and Honesty, and damning indolence or dishonesty.’ Michael Rosenthal, Constable, the Painter and his Landscape, New Haven 1983, p49. ↑

4 CR Leslie, Memoirs of the Life of John Constable, London 1949, p64. ↑

5 For a discussion of this mezzotint see Leslie Parris, John Constable & David Lucas, New York 1993), pp51–52. ↑

6 JCC II, p54. ↑

7 Ibid. ↑

8 JCC II, p80 ↑

9 The painting depicted here came to light in the United States in the 1990s and was extensively studied using ultraviolet, Xradiography, infrared examination, and stylistic analysis. All materials were carefully analysed and the conclusion of those who worked on it is that it is unlikely to have been a copy of the Valley Farm of 1835. It is important to note that there is no close study for the Valley Farm, as there is for almost every other major Constable work. The fact that this painting is almost exactly a quarter size of the final painting further indicates such a possibility. In the pages that follow much of the information produced in the study of this work has been incorporated into understanding the progression of Constable’s work. In this sense the painting has been very useful in showing how Constable approached his subject. It is clear that the painting started as a rough palette-knife sketch. After this initial depiction, which was dramatically different from the surface composition, it was worked up with new drawing and the inclusion of multiple new elements. It is the author’s belief that the painting we are seeing here is not only The Study for the Valley Farm but that it is ‘Landscape No.9’ of the 1829 Royal Academy Exhibition, the ‘Garter Painting,’ that was given to John Fisher in August of that year. Mrs Fisher noted, as I will show, that it was an early work and of a favourite subject. John Fisher indicated that he was aware that it was a painting that had gone through a number of transitions which he had obviously seen in Constable’s studio. As he wrote, it was a ‘thing’ that had become a ‘pleasing picture’ with an agreeable ‘surface’. Fisher praised it elaborately as the best example of Constable’s art. Constable himself described it to Fisher as showing a ‘rich cottage’. When it arrived at Salisbury, Fisher associated it immediately with Constable’s copy of Claude’s Hagar and the Angel. A few days later he wrote of it as also including a ‘boat’. It is likely that this painting was exhibited in Birmingham in 1832 as The Ferry. Later that year it was sent to David Lucas, Constable’s engraver, to be ‘squared up’ for the final work. Finally, it was back in Constable’s studio at the time of his death in 1837. In 1838 it was put into the Foster’s Constable sale by John Jr as one of the hand-written addendums, Lot 83, ‘Sketch Valley Farm’, and was bought by CR Leslie for 8 pounds, 18 shillings and 6 pence. ↑

10 This painting shows not only the cow walking at the left front, but what seems to be a sketchy cow form beneath the tree. ↑

11 Reynolds I-T, p186. Reynolds writes: ‘Fleming-Williams suggests that the central section was drawn c. 1812-13 and the extending strips added a year or two later.’ ↑

12 Ibid. ↑

13 JCC I, p101. ↑

14 JCC II, p.120.↑

15 JCC IV, pp37-38. ↑

16 Kathryn Cave, ed, The Diary of Joseph Farrington, New Haven 1984), vol XIII, p4564. ↑

17 JCC II,p.121 ↑

18 JCC I, p101. The use of the word ‘finish’ is interesting. Many have interpreted Constable’s statement to Dunthome as indicating that he intended to make a study on the spot for every larger work hereafter. But linked as ‘finish’ was with ‘finished works’ in the first part of his statement, it may well be that Constable intended to work out a way of painting a completed painting, a finished work, on site. This would suggest that he sought a different road to finish than that of his Royal Academy companions. ↑

19 Reynolds I-T, p212. Reynolds dates the work to 1815. He notes that it was dated c1815 in the 1976 Tate Catalogue, but in the 1991 Tate Catalogue was given the dating 1816–18 by Leslie Parris and Ian Fleming-Williams. ↑

20 JCC IV, p216.↑

21 JCC II, p26. ↑

22 Leslie tells us that Constable on hearing from his doctor (Gooch) that he ‘found every individual case of disease a new study’, replied, ‘In like manner every truly original picture is a separate study, and governed by laws of its own; so that what is right in one, would be often entirely wrong if transferred to another.’ See Leslie, p299. ↑

23 JCC VI, p65. ↑

24 Quoted from Charles Nodier, Promenades de Dieppe aux Montagues d’Ecosse in WT Whitley, Art In England 1821–1837, Cambridge 1930, p8. ↑

25 JCC VI, p123. Fisher wrote to Constable on July 5, 1823: ‘I have a great desire to possess your “wain”. But I cannot now reach what it is worth & what you must have. But I have this favour to ask that you would never part with it without letting me know.’ ↑

26 JCC VI, p124. Constable replied on 19 July 1823. ↑

27 JCC VI, p74. ↑

28 JCC VI, p76. ↑

29 JCC II, p290. ↑

30 JCC II, p295. ↑

31 JCC II, p299. Maria wrote, ‘As to your Claude I would not advise you to show it to me for I shall follow Mr. Bigg’s advice & throw them all out the window.’ ↑

32 JCFD, p149. ↑

33 JCC II, p296. ↑

34 JCC VI, p157. ↑

35 JCC VI, p239. ↑

36 JCC VI, pp239-40. ↑

37 JCC VI, p.242. ↑

38 JCC VI, pp242-43. ↑

39JCC VI, 244. ↑

40 Ibid. ↑

441 Ibid. ↑

Ibid. ↑

43 42 Judy Crosby Ivy, Constable and the Critics, 1802–1837, Woodbridge 1991, p134. ↑

44 Leslie, p 194. ↑

45 Ivy, p133. ↑

46 Ivy, p134. ↑

47 Letter from Ramsay Richard Reinagle to the Editor of The Literary Gazette (London) published in the Gazette on 18 May 1850, p342. Reinagle wrote: ‘The late Mr. Constable, R.A., a pupil of mine, exhibited a landscape in the large room of Somerset House, in which I painted a group of cattle showing the breath steaming from their mouths; I did them with palette knife to imitate his manner, and he kindly fathered them.’ ↑

48 JCC IV, p222. ↑

49 See FG Notehelfer, ‘The Strange Case of Ramsay Richard Reinagle’, The British Art Journal, XXI, 1 (2020), pp16–27. As my article shows, Reinagle was far more complex than the portrait that Beckett paints of him in his work on Constable. His expulsion from the Royal Academy in 1848 was for reasons that went beyond the usual claim that he exhibited at work that year that was ‘not by his own hand.’ If Reinagle had been lying, as Beckett claims, then CR Leslie or Constable’s son would have challenged him in response to his ‘letter’. That neither offered a word in response to Reinagle’s assertion strongly suggests that they knew the existence of the painting which had gone to the Fishers and then back to Constable’s studio by the time of his death. John Jr put it in the Foster’s sale as an addendum, as ‘Sketch Valley Farm,’ where it was bought by Leslie, and so he was definitely familiar with the work. At the same time Reinagle did like to exaggerate his claims. What the painting shows is that the heads of the cows, particularly the head of the third cow, that is expelling its breath, was altered in a manner unlike Constable’s style. ↑

50 See Catalogue of Royal Academy of Arts in London Exhibition of 1829, pp5ff. ↑

51 JCC VI, p248. ↑

52 JCC VI, p260. ↑

53 Ibid. ↑

54 JCC VI, p251. ↑

55 JCC VI, p253. ↑

56 See Birmingham Society of Arts, Birmingham Society of Arts, Exhibition 1832, Birmingham 1832, p19. The Ferry was no. 171 of the exhibition and was hung in the Front Room West. This suggests that The Ferry was a smaller work and did not merit placement in the Great Room of the exhibition. Constable exhibited the following works in Birmingham: In 1828 he sent the 1826 (or 1827) RA work Gillingham Mill; in 1829 he sent the 1826 RA work The Cornfield (exhibited in Birmingham as Noon); in 1832 (his next exhibition there) he sent what I believe was Landscape No. 9 of the 1829 RA exhibition (The Study for the Valley Farm) which was exhibited as The Ferry (this needs to be confirmed); in 1834 he sent the 1831 RA work Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows. ↑

57 JCC VI, p254. ↑

58 JCC VI, p255. ↑

59 JCC VI, p259. ↑

60 JCC VI, p255 ↑

61 JCC VI, p212. Constable had sent The White Horse to Lille at the end of 1825 without telling the Archdeacon. He wrote to Fisher, ‘Your picture did me great credit at Lille. I am honourably mentioned… and a gold medal was voted to me by the Jury, which I received yesterday… so the Exhibition has extended my reputation.’ ↑

62 RB Beckett, John Constable and the Fishers: A Record of a Friendship, London 1952) p281. ↑

63 JCC VI, p258. ↑

64 Ibid. ↑

65 Ibid. ↑

66 JCC VI, 259. ↑

67 JCC VI, p262. ↑

68 It is possible that this watercolour was produced after Fisher’s death in France in 1832. As we will see, the subject, which had begun with his Christmas drawing of 1829 ,was closely associated with Fisher and it seems that Constable later tried to work it up into a painting honouring the Archdeacon – an effort that ended in failure. ↑

69 JCC VI, p263. In the letter she wrote to Constable telling him of the Archdeacon’s death, Mary, Fisher’s sister, noted: ‘Since you met my Sisters on the road, my poor dear Brother & Mary determined on both going into France for a time to try what change of Climate would do for his health.’ This suggests a meeting, but where is not clear. ↑

70 JCC VI, p264. ↑

71 JCC VI, pp264–65. ↑

72 RB Beckett, John Constable and the Fishers, p281. ↑

73 JCC VI, p267. ↑

74 Beckett has dated the letter from Mary Fisher to John Charles Constable as having been written on April 29, 1837. This is clearly a dating error on Beckett’s part. The date should have been April 29, 1838. I have elaborated on the reasons for this error in my article ‘Some Further Observations on John Constable’s ‘Garter Painting’,’ The British Art Journal, XXIV, 1 (2022), pp70–72. As I noted in this article, Mary Fisher’s reply reached John Jr early in May, the Constable sale had already been scheduled and the catalogue published by the time it arrived. As noted above, John Jr seems to have added the painting to the sale as an addendum, Lot 83, ‘Sketch Valley Farm’ and it was bought by Leslie. ↑

75 JCC VI, pp271–72. ↑

76 JCC VI, p252. ↑

77 JCC IV, p390. ↑

78 JCC IV, p390. Beckett commenting on this passage in the Correspondence notes that what Constable may have been referring to here was a mezzotint that Lucas had prepared earlier, and that squaring, in this instance, may have meant the addition of framing lines to the engraving and not the usual transfer of an image from a sketch or study to a new canvas. Constable scholars have generally accepted Beckett’s interpretation that the reference in the Lucas’ letter is to a mezzotint, but there are a number of problems with this interpretation. We know, for example, that Lucas produced a mezzotint of Willy Lott’s house early in 1832 which Constable had intended to include in English Landscape which he was publishing. But the print was imperfect and was not included in the version of English Landscape published by the summer of 1832. In fact, the plate in question was not published during Constable’s lifetime. It should be noted that Constable still felt ambivalent about this mezzotint in 1834, and indicated to Lucas that if he was prepared to produce a new work of the subject he would be willing to ‘suppress the little plate’. If Constable was not pleased with the mezzotint in 1832 and was still not fully committed to it in 1834, why would he state in December 1832 that he and Henry Howard liked it? It seems unlikely that Constable would have shown Howard a deficient small mezzotint. His relationship with Howard was very formal and he was not a person to whom Constable went for advice on his work. Something is not right here. Close examination of Constable’s relationship to Lucas shows, moreover, that by 1832 Constable had come to rely on Lucas not only to produce mezzotints, but to perform various studio chores that had previously been the domain of Johnny Dunthorne. Constable had regularly asked Dunthorne to square works and prepare the outlines on new canvases. Was he not asking Lucas to do the same? It certainly seems more convincing to argue that Constable contemplated a larger work from the small Ferry which he and Howard liked, and that this was the beginning of the process that led to the Tate’s Valley Farm. ↑

79 JCC III, p96. ↑

80 Leslie, p132. ↑

81 JCC III, pp105–6. ↑

82 JCCIII, p111. ↑

83 Mary Sturge Gretton, Constable, London 1911, p116. See also Andrew Shirley, The Published Mezzotints of David Lucas after John Constable R.A., Oxford 1930. ↑

84 JCC VI p78. ↑

85 JCC III, p111. ↑

86 JCC VI, p258. ↑

87 See for example J Barell, The Dark Side of the Landscape, Cambridge 1980.↑

88 JCC III, p121–22. ↑

89 JCD, p52–53.↑

90 JCD, p54. ↑

91 As I have pointed out earlier the theme of Constable’s proposed new work combined the composition of The White Horse with his Study for the Valley Farm. Malcolm Cormack, who had no knowledge of the Study for The Valley Farm when he wrote in 1986 made the following interesting observation about these works: ‘The studies were apparently directed towards an image of “On the Stour” [Cormack’s title for The Farmhouse by the River’s Edge] that would combine elements of The White Horse, and what came to be The Valley Farm.’ Malcolm Cormack, Constable, Cambridge 1986, p224. ↑

92 JCC III, p119. ↑

93 JCC I, p287. ↑

94 JCC V, pp13–14. ↑

95 JCC VI, p244. ↑

96 JCC III, p124. ↑

97 JCC III, p123. ↑

98 JCC III, p124. ↑

99 JCC V, p20. ↑

100 Ivy, p202. The reviewer was Edward Dubois for The Observer. ↑

101 David Hill, Constable’s English Landscape Scenery, London 1985, p21. Hill writes, ‘In The Valley Farm gone are the dews, the breezes, the light, the bloom and the freshness, which were his constant reminders of a healthy relationship with nature. They are replaced by blackened trees, a sky more grey and brown than blue, and while a breeze seems to shake the tops of the trees, below the air is still and heavy, to judge from the reflections of the cows, swallows still skim over the water, but its surface is oily, and the ferry seems stuck in gelatin rather than fresh water.’ ↑

102 Ivy, p 207. The critic was the Revd John Eagles in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. ↑

103 Leslie’s observation comes from his biography of Constable in which he also states that the painting was painted from an early sketch. It should be noted that much of the time that Constable was painting The Valley Farm in 1833–34 Leslie was in the United States teaching at West Point. In fact he did not return to see The Valley Farm exhibited at the RA in 1835. His first glimpse of the painting seems to have come later that year as Constable was getting it ready for exhibition at the British Institution – much to Vernon, its owner’s, ‘fidgeting.’ Being in the U.S. Leslie would not have had access many of the reviews of the painting. So we have to ask ourselves what he was speaking about when he referred to its good press. Very likely what he recalled was the strong praise The Study for the Valley Farm had received from critics in 1829! ↑

104 Ivy, p134. ↑

105 Ivy’s book treats most of the critical comments on this work, see pp199–208.↑

106 Ibid, p199. ↑

107 Ibid, p200. ↑

108 Ibid, p202. ↑

109 JCC IV, p278. Letter to JJ Chalon, dated 29 October 1835. ↑

110 JCC III, p132. ↑

111 JCC III, p133. ↑

112 JCC III, p124. ↑

113 JCC V, p70. ↑

114 Leslie Parris and Ian Fleming-Williams, Constable, London 1991, p378 ↑

115 Graham Reynolds, Constable: The Natural Painter, London 1965, p127. ↑

116 Conal Shields and Leslie Parris, John Constable 1776-1837, London 1969), p18. ↑

117 Freda Constable, John Constable: A Biography – 1776-1837, Lavenham 1975, p139–40. ↑

118 David Hill, Constable’s English Landscape Scenery, London 1985, p21. ↑