Marginalia
Peter Conrad
John Constable 1776-1837 John Lloyd Fraser (Hutchinson £6.95) Constable and his world Reg Gadney (Thames and Hudson £3.50) Bicentennials are acts less of celebration than restitution, products not of pride but of an uneasy conscience. The Americans have devoted this year to the belated manufacture of a history, in the hope of overcoming their sense of inferiority to Europe; our local equivalent is the festival of enthusiasm for Constable, in which the aesthetic establishment is making amends for its shabby, dismissive treatment of him during his life. Mr Lloyd Fraser and Mr Gadney have remade Constable for the occasion: the artist whose images have been sentimentalised on travel posters and biscuit tins is revealed as testy, melancholic, obstinate and rebellious, a reclusive curmudgeon with none of the dapper worldliness of Turner.
The pity is that both authors have chosen to write anecdotal biographies rather than critical rejuvenations of Constable. Biography is almost a national intellectual weakness, and its purpose is to entice even ill-tempered solitaries %like Constable into the charmed circle of acquaintance of which the English artistic past is felt to consist. Criticism would imply an unseemly professionalism: it is as improper to be serious about an artist's work as it is to talk shop at Oxford dinnertables. Biography confers respectability, since it is the English conviction that artists are to be treasured for their small foibles and charming personal quirks rather than for their art. Blake said that if an artist doesn't mop and mow in deference to polite society, that society decrees he must be starved. Then it waits two hundred years and writes reconciliatory biographies.
Neither Mr Lloyd Fraser nor Mr Gadney put the material uncovered by their researches to work critically; but they make it possible for others to do so. Their selections from contemporary reviews are particularly valuable, because they help to explain Constable's exclusion from academic honours. His crime was to paint landscapes, which the art-world stigmatised as socially inferior. The history painter could be revered because of the elevation of his culture, the portrait painter tolerated because, to copy one's visage, he must at least be permitted in one's house; but the landscape painter not only refuses to idealise the heroic celebrities of the past and to flatter the social lions of the present, but works outdoors, exposed to the weather, in the company of artisans and no better than one of them. Landscape threatened a system of values which expected art to confirm social order. Landscapes were of interest only as a view from a curtained window, or as real estate, or, when domesticated, as a tame space to walk in; the land is subordinate to those who own it or exercise in it. To paint it evacuated of those whose fief it is, turbid, stormy and slimy, as Constable did, was an offence against the genteel colonisation of the countryside performed by the Palladian villas and artificial gardens of the eighteenth century.
Constable sets the rights of ownership against those of artistic imitation in a letter about his sketching on Hampstead Heath: "I have done some studies . . . which will be of quite as much service as if I had bought the field and hedgerow . . . and perhaps one time or another will fetch as much for my children". His last painting even gives the mill at Arundel precedence in the composition over the castle. He was churlishly indifferent to the sublime, knowing that this romantic fad simply provided society with the chance to patronise nature on occasions when it spectacularly distinguished itself. He refused to paint the Devil's Dyke because it was too impressive. He disliked the Lake District, knowing that Wordsworth had simply colonised that vast vacancy mentally rather than, in the eighteenth century manner, socially, making it an obedient reflector of his own mind. Meeting Wordsworth, Constable was amusingly sarcastic about his phrenological conceit—he requested a lady "to notice the singular formation of his skull". Wordsworth redeemed landscape by making its atmospheric changes events inside that commodious head.
Constable took a surly delight in representing himself not as an apologist for history, or an adjunct of fashion like the portraitist, but a rude agricultural worker. Turner painted Canaletto toying with a bobbing easel among the shipping of the Grand Canal; Constable, however, saw himself as the colleague of country labourers: "I live almost wholly in the fields and see nobody but the harvest men." The landscape painter's day is ordered like the labourer's: Constable knew at what time to leave off work when a nearby chimney began to smoke, indicating the preparation of supper for the returning workman. Hence Constable's disavowal of Blake's compliment, 'Why this is not drawing, but inspiration'. Constable preferred to think of it as the product of labour, not the idle afflatus of imagination, and replied, 'I never knew it before; I meant it for drawing'.
Just as the romantic novel was profaning one taboo by confiding the secrets of private life, disputing the social censorship of dangerous emotions, so landscape painting was outraging a related taboo in taking art outdoors, questioning the rights of the studio in which art was
fabricated, as Gainsborough had pieced together his toy landscapes, and of the salon in which it was exhibited for polite approbation. Constable's indoor retreat was, characteristically, not a loft but a cellar: at Hampstead he cleared a garden shed of its litter and converted the coal hole into a studio. The shaming associations of the open air introduce a sting even into Fuseli's complimentary remark that Constable's landscapes always made him call for his great coat, and into Fisher's phrase granting permission for 'The Hay Wain', on which he had an option, to be shown at the Louvre: 'Let your Hay Cart go to Paris by all means. I am too much pulled down by agricultural distress to hope to possess it'. The picture turns back into the rural waggon which is its subject, and Constable becomes the prospering farmer pushing it to market in Paris.
The jokes about Constable's painterly technique, furious in application and viscous in texture, all serve the purpose of social deprecation. Mr Lloyd Fraser quotes one critic who found in his style an ungentlemanly ferocity, 'as if the colours were lain on with a knife rather than with a brush', and another who thought his manner an infantile dabbling, as if he daubed the canvas with fingers and toes. Constable's brush is demeaned into a tool, a worker's grubby implement : the Morning Chronicle, commenting on the thick impasto of his 'Waterloo Bridge', remarked that 'if any plasterers were required, he might have been better employed in the erection of the bridge itself than in painting the subject', and Turner suggested that `Hadleigh Castle' had been splashed 'during the white-washing of Constable's ceiling'. Constable defensively welcomed such slights, and once hailed two chimney sweeps who were being ushered out of a neighbour's house as he arrived, 'What, brother brush'. Even after his admission to the Royal Academy, he continued to be inadvertently cast in the role of rural outlaw. Arranging a setting for a life class on Eve, he despatched assistants to Hampstead to collect green boughs for the Garden of Eden; on the return journey they were twice stopped by the police, who suspected '(as was the case) they had robbed some gentleman's garden'.
The rival biographies overlap, fated to retail the same anecdotes. Mr Gadney's text is a modest marginal accompaniment to the illustrations; Mr Lloyd Fraser's is the more substantial, adventurously researched and often startlingly original about the pictures, as when he notices that 'Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows' dreamily super-impose Constable's two sacred English landscapes—'the top half .. • belongs to Wiltshire while the lower half with its "slimy posts" and horses pulling a tumbril . . . could be taken for a scene on the Stour'. Occasionally Mr Lloyd Fraser's work in television manifests itself in a visual narrative, which records action as if in a shooting script: 'A few days
before Christmas Constable boarded the mail coach to Worcester. From there he made his way to Bewdley and presented himself at Spring Grove' ; or: 'It is moving to imagine the lonely, ageing artist struggling away in his painting room in Charlotte Street while some of his seven children would be elsewhere in the house, occasionally coming in to see their father playing with his pretty colours'. It is a shame that criticism feels obliged to camouflage itself as biography in the book —its subtitle is 'The man and his mistress', the mistress being landscape: Constable's intellectual infatuation has to be justified by being treated, metaphorically, as an indiscreet personal relationship.
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