Chatto £17.99 pp384
This is the first biography of Constable for 163 years, and only the second ever written, which is surely surprising. A few years after the painter’s death, Constable’s friend Charles Leslie gathered together all the recollections he could find, and what gaps were left in Leslie’s biography were eventually filled with the publication of Constable’s lengthy correspondence, in the 1960s. As Anthony Bailey admits at the outset of his own effort, the Leslie life and the voluminous letters seemed to say it all.
Why so few lovers of Constable should have felt the urge to write their hero’s biography is also made clear by Bailey’s rare attempt, although this time accidentally. Basically, nothing much happened to Constable. He had a boring life. He was born in Suffolk, became a painter, married, had seven children, and that was it. He never went abroad. Never had an affair. The only real controversy that ever surrounded him concerned his style of painting, which many considered “ mannered”. So he is not the stuff of the normal biographer’s dreams. But he is the stuff of Bailey’s dreams.
Bailey enjoys quietude. He responds to it, and knows how to deal with it. The book that brought him to most people’s attention was Vermeer: A View of Delft, his gentle life of that most gentle of painters. Bailey wrote well about Vermeer because he understood the magic of the unassuming detail. He writes well about Constable for that reason again, but also because this time he’s an Englishman writing about an Englishman, yeoman to yeoman, on the Magna Carta level. On more than one occasion he insists that the English countryside in Constable’s day looked more perfectly beautiful than it ever had, or would, and much of this book has been written, you feel, through moist eyes. Thus Bailey performs the chronicler’s task with a novelist’s heart, which is why he is the pleasing biographer he is.
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Constable was born in 1776, in East Bergholt in Suffolk, in the posh new house that his father, a wealthy mill-owner and coal-importer, had recently purchased to emphasise his rise up the rural ladder. You already know the landscape Constable was born into because it is the subject of most of his best-known paintings. Within a few 100 yards of his father’s mill in Flatford was Dedham Mill, that place where The White Horse gets onto a barge, the spot on the towpath where The Leaping Horse leaps over, The Lock, and the famous fluvial dead-end shown in The Hay Wain. Everything in Constable’s hugely famous painted cosmos could be found right under his childhood nose on the River Stour.
Yet the biggest of the surprises yielded by Bailey’s surprisingly surprising life of Constable is how little time Constable actually spent in Suffolk. We have this image of him as the determined English countryman, the reclusive champion of rural ways, who preferred towpaths to city streets. Yet, after growing up in Constable country, Constable lived most of his life in London. Once he’d left East Bergholt — which he did as soon as he could, coaching off to London the moment his father agreed on a generous allowance — he was never again more than an infrequent visitor to the childhood spaces that eventually made him so famous. He was absolutely a city artist, and the English countryside was a state of mind for Constable, a work of fiction. To make that as clear to us as happens here strikes me as terribly important.
His early career seems to take place in slow-motion. It begins with him sketching around Flatford with a village friend, and barely accelarates when he reaches town. A useful succession of family acquaintances and London contacts are collared into giving advice and commissions. He copies some old masters. He does some portraits. But it takes an eternity for him to stop being a student, and another eternity for him to find himself.
So it’s a good job also that Bailey is as fond of quietude as he is, and as skilled at mining it. What little drama there is in Constable’s early life concerns matters of an utterly quotidian nature, such as his seemingly interminable effort to get himself elected to the Royal Academy. Turner had succeeded painlessly many years before. But poor old Constable sought election time after time, and year after year he was rejected. Bailey seems never to tire of detailing the unaesthetic bitchiness and inglorious internal games-playing that kept Constable out of the RA. Those of us who have always been told that he wasn’t elected because landscape was considered an unworthy subject — too lowly for the pompous academy — are only half right. At least as influential was Constable’s charmless and spiteful nature. He had a talent for getting up people’s noses, and the long effort to get into the academy brought out that talent in full. What is fascinating, and even depressing, is that he should have wished so fervently to join the ranks of the feeble establishment artists he seemed so opposed to.
In fact Constable turns out to have been unpleasantly conservative on most matters: a rural Tory in his thinking and his voting. He was against Catholic emancipation. Against the Reform Bill. Against “the rabble and dregs of the people” agitating for parliamentary reform. Against Cobbett. Against mothers taking a swim in Brighton because it exposed him to the sight of “those most hideous amphibian animals, the old bathing women”. When Byron died, Constable complained that “the deadly touch of his slime still remains”. One unhappy contemporary described him as “a crab stick”, and I’d go along with that. That Bailey chooses to remain un-disappointed by Constable’s reactionary views is another of the book’s surprises.
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Constable’s wooing of Maria Bicknell, which occupies a second huge slab of the book, took place at the same interminable pace as the application for academy entry. She eventually bore him seven children, before the effort of achieving this combined with consumption to kill her, and to devastate him. Always presented as a doting father, he was, however, good enough at looking after number one to ensure that his sick wife was usually stuck out of sight with the kids while he pursued his career.
Thus a picture slowly emerges of a reactionary who became a revolutionary by default: because he refused so obdurately to follow anyone else’s path. It’s a picture I find utterly convincing.
DEBT RELIEF
Constable spent much of his life beset by money worries — in 1821, for instance, after failing to sell The Hay Wain, he complained to a friend from whom he was borrowing £5 that the painting had impoverished him. His troubles only ended when his wife’s father died in 1828 and left her £20,000. The 51-year-old painter felt a great burden lift. At last, he said, he could “stand before a 6-foot canvas with a mind at ease (thank God)” .
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