Art
'My light'
John McEwen It's understandable • that those ,entrusted With the awesome task of presenting Constable's bicentenary exhibition (Tate Gallery till 25 April) would mount any'thing rather than a conventional show, and unfortunately this is what has happened. The crowds will fulfil their cultural duty.however long the queue, so what does it matter? 'But artless unemployment affords you the Chance of going first thing on a Monday Morning or prefeiment works in your favour after hours, keep away. There's enough of his work on permanent view in London not to make it worth the struggle.
Unlike the turner extravaganza of a year 40, this is an inquest, A warren of bays and narrow passages whose walls support an e,Thaustive thesis to the effect that Constable was a much more complicated artist, and Provides a much more complicated casehistory, than 'The Hay Wain' might lead You to stippose. In other words Constable has fallen victim of research. Unhappily, he is a perfect subject. No artist can have left 11lore unauthenticated, and even unaccounted for, work in his train; his sons, one of them called John like himseff, imitated his stYle; his assistant, Johnny Dunthorne andoubtealy lent a ,hand with some of the Middle-period painting; his oil sketches Were often 'finished' by well-meaning but avaricious owners and resold; even one of his best friends, George Constable (no relation), forged his works t °piously; and ,lbrgeries in general were ,somumerous that, ' 031 the end of the century they were esti' _Mated to easily outnurnber the originals. 'None of this ihspires confidence, and ' several authenticated examples in the current exhibition ,begin to look highly questionable as a result. But researdh, of course, thrives on uncertainty, and the late R. B. oeckett's efforts have now provided enough (locumentation of the artist's life to make the identification of Constables an industry. lience such marginalia in the notes to the Dresent exhibitionas'3 August: tp London with a pimpy for Maria, returning on 12th'. 4en Conal Shields refers, in the final para' graph of the worst written (the'refore worst edited) catalogue essay sI have ever tried to I read, to a previous.Constable exhibition he I had organised as, hiving 'demonstrated to an unparalleled degree the range of Constable's interest'. It is easy to imagine that a glimpse of 'The Hay Wain', which is all its Modest positioning allows, comes as a welcome relief.
The exhibition is designed to revealthe Public and private aspect of Constable's art without discrimination. It accentuates his slew development (Constable painted little el' note before his thirties) and his long
struggle to become a Royal Academician. Accordingly there is a quantity of dull and uncharacteristic apprentice work, and a hack commission or two like the Nayland parish church altarpiece, before the landscapes predominate. Even these have been muddled to show the 'exhibited' paintings, hung against pinkish backgrounds to identify them from the rest, in the haphazard order in which they appeared at the Royal Academy during his lifetime: a propos of which it must be remembered that there was nowhere else to exhibit in those days, and that full membership conferred on you the right to be addressed as 'Esquire' and usually guaranteed your sales for life. Perhaps to ingratiate himself with the Academy, therefore, Constable sometimes exhibited less experimental work of an earlier date than the year in question. Nevertheless the hanging at the Tate is roughly chronological, and informative when the finished subject is placed opposite the preparatory sketch.
To be in the first rank an artist must be an innovator. Constable's innovation was to paint naturalistic landscapes on a scale previously thought suitable only for portraiture, or subjects of historical, biblical or mythical association of an ennobling kind. He scorned the Academy's "highminded" members who stickle for the "elevated and noble" values of art—preferring the shaggy posteriors of a Satyr to the moral feeling of a landscape'. And it was the scale of his work which enforced that morality. A morality of truth to experience, an age away from the genteel sermons of his Victorian successors. In his method, of course, he was heir to the scientific accuracy of the eighteenth-century topographical watercolourists, and in particular Girtin whose influence can be seen in the minute pencil sketches of his pocketbooks.
'Painting', he writes in his Fourth Lecture, 'should be understood, not looked on with blind wonder, nor considered only as a :poetic aspiration, but as a pursuit, legitimate, scientific, and mechanical'. In Constable's case, this implies the effect of light on landscape. It was this obsession with the transitory nature of English summer daylight that made it quite unnecessary for him to change his locations. East Anglia with its huge skies was ideal in any case. He never went abroad, and one visit to the Lake District was enough. But he was far from provincial. He revered the Dutch masters, who had confronted similar problems in the seventeenth century, and saw himself as the descendant of a European landscape tradir don stretching back to Giotto. To this tradition he wanted to contribute 'my "light"—my "dews"—my "breezes"—my "bloom" and my "freshness"—no one of which qualities have yet been perfected on the canvas of any painter in the world'. And to achieve such transitory qualities on a heroic scale he eventually drove the paint in the 1835 'Cottage at East Bergholt' almost to the point of dissolving the image. A frenzied identification with landscape ex
pressed with an intensity matched subsequently only by Soutine and Pollock. But if this was his most prophetic achievement, nothing can diminish the brilliance of his oil sketches, too few of which are included here, or the superb rendering of waterreflected light in the 'exhibited/ version of 'The Leaping Horse', surely his masterpiece, or the study for 'Hadleigh Castle'.
In 1829 Constable was at last elected to the Academy by one vote. He was fiftythree. Turner, one year his senior, who had been elected with acclamation thirty years before, brought the news. Surprisingly Constable was not a popular painter in his lifetime. And yet a chance compliment he received, going through Dedham on the coach to London, has proved far more accurate. When he remarked to one of his fellow-passengers that the view was very beautiful the stranger replied: 'Yes Sir— this is Constable's country!' That continuing truth finally stamps his extraordinary achievement and even today, when the urban area of Britain outnumbers the acreage of trees, it is a fact worth celebrating rather more jubilantly than has been done at the Tate.
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