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The Peculiarly English Painter: John Constable
| Article
# : |
19658 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1991 |
1,966 Words |
| Author
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Michael Rosenthal
Michael Rosenthal is senior lecturer in art history at the
University of Warwick. His books include Constable: The
Painter and His Landscape (Yale University Press) and
Constable (Thames and Hudson). |
While the English (as distinct from the British) are traditionally indifferent to art, they all know John Constable's Hay Wain. It has been reproduced on everything from biscuit tins and tea towels to crockery, and popularly embodies the quintessential "English" landscape. So powerful is this association that environmentalists exploited it by superimposing a freeway over a poster of the landscape, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament likewise made its point by transmogrifying the wagon into a cruise missile carrier. The place actually represented in the painting, Willie Lott's Farm at Flatford Mill, Suffolk, attracts thousands of visitors, who see an apparently unchanged house and try to imagine away the vegetation that blocks the view to Constable's distant meadows (actually not so distant) in which tiny mowers cut the hay, and where a loaded wagon stands waiting to be replaced by the empty one fording the river, stopping, it has been said, to swell the wooden wheels to fit iron rims expanded in summer heat.
This painting was the sensation of the 1824 Paris Salon. Legend has Delacroix retouching parts of his Massacre at Chios; others echoed Paul Huet's view that the painting was "a magnificent lesson." "Think of the lovely valleys mid the peaceful farm houses of Suffolk forming a scene to amuse the gay & frivolous Parisians" mused Constable to his friend Archdeacon John Fisher of Salisbury in Wiltshire. He still turned down invitations to cross the Channel. In 1823 he had written, "I was born to paint a happier land, my own dear England," and, by the midtwenties, the press seemed to agree. "The character of Mr. Constable's style is peculiarly English," wrote the London Magazine in 1824.
So, somehow, pictures of a corner of East Anglia, the region comprising the counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, and part of Essex situated to the north and east of London, had come to represent "England"--pictures of Constable's native scenes, the places where his family lived and worked and to which, until 1817, he would frequently return. East Bergholt, his home village, lies above the valley of the river Stour, which divides Suffolk from Essex, and Constable found may subjects in its near vicinity. A mile away, in the valley, is Flatford Mill, owned by his family. The paterfamilias, Golding Constable, had extensive business interests in milling, barge construction, and transportation along the navigable river, and coastal trading, with yards at Brantham and Mistley on the estuary. This wealthy and respectable background spared Constable his intended fate of taking over the business, and subsidized him so far as to save him from ever having to sell pictures to
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