Biography: The portrait of Constable that emerges is rounded, attractive and entertaining
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.
Thus wrote John Constable in 1833, four years before his death. Add "clouds" to the list and one has most of the qualities of his kingdom. But then (with the addition of "steam"), one also has Turner. Both are heads-up painters, artists of the physical fact but also of the fleeting moment whose eyes are turned skywards. As is often the case with the far-seeing, it was nearness which kept Constable from fame for so long. Many of his contemporaries could only appreciate him from a distance - up close his paint was "ferocious", "freckled and pock-marked", scattered over "with a huge quantity of chopped hay". The London Magazine said:
The end is perfectly answered; why the means should be obtruded as an eye-sore, we do not understand. It is like keeping up the scaffolding, after the house is built. It is evident that Mr Constable's landscapes are like nature; it is still more evident that they are paint.
At the time this was perceptive. Now, thanks largely to Constable, the perception has been reversed. Not only do we like to see the scaffolding, we think the way Jack builds the house is the house. Preferring art that bares its wounds, we rather despise the "finish" - a now wholly disused word - that disguises them. As for "eye-sore", Constable himself, when he had worked exceptionally hard at a painting, said he had given it more "eye-salve" than usual. The irony is that nowadays developed taste wishes he'd laid on even less of the lotion.
Undeveloped taste occupies another country. It is England as a brand-name, an Arcadia preserved in the amber of the National Trust. At the furthest extreme it is The Hay Wain on a table-mat. Even in the painter's lifetime this merger was under way: once while travelling by coach, he remarked on the beauty of the Suffolk landscape and a passenger, who didn't know who he was, responded, "Yes, sir, this is Constable's country".
This was literally true. Ownership of land and its produce were crucial to his career. Ann Taylor, immortal author of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, who visited the Constable family in 1799, thought that both their trade, grain milling, and their expectation of the aspiring painter becoming a miller "unspeakably barbarous". But as far as our nearest neighbour is concerned, we always have to bear in mind the economics of scale and of snobbery: Taylor wasn't thinking of young John hefting sacks of flour for a living. For most of his life the backbone of his income was allowances from the family business and inheritances - he only achieved security finally when his wife's father left her £20,000.
Economic realism similarly underpins the painting: a hay wain for him was the equivalent of a Harry Crosbie truck for us, and when he painted corn fields, as he often did, it was with the knowledge that the price of wheat had more than doubled in 20 years. His Arcadia was an open-air factory, peopled with miniature serfs, made small by the landscape of their labour. Also, when we breathe in his airiness it's worth considering that there was so much oxygen above because there was so little below - like countless others, Constable's wife died young of TB.
This is not to say that either Karl Marx or Dr Noel Browne would have been enamoured of Constable's politics: he was a Wellington Tory, the kind who, when Byron died, was only sorrowful that "the deadly slime of his touch still remains". But Constable was more than National Front or National Trust property. The newness of his genius was an expression of his personality: he was "a great egotist but not a selfish egotist", amiable but sarcastic, "a crab stick", generous, down-to-earth, more daddy than patriarch. His fondness for children, according to a friend, "exceeded that of any man I ever knew". When one of his seven offspring ruinously slashed a canvas with a broom-handle, Constable exclaimed. "Oh! My dear pet! See what we have done! Dear, dear! What shall we do to mend it? I can't think - can you?"
Considering the iconic stature and the vast amount written in recent years about the iconography, it is surprising that this is the first full-scale biography since 1843. Anthony Bailey doesn't claim to reveal startling new information, but he has lifted the lids on all the pies, pulled out the plums and served them up in a different and toothsome order. There are lacunae - the early life, for instance, is skeletal and entirely sexless. And there is an over-reliance, perhaps inevitable, on Ronald Beckett's edition of the letters. On the other hand, Bailey's filleting and chronological rearrangement of that thematically organised six-volume doorstopper is judicious. The portrait that emerges is rounded, attractive and entertaining.
Although others, particularly the Dutch, had explored the psychology of landscape - one can think of him as the English Van Ruysdael - Constable opened a route into the psychology of paint itself. His originality was recognised by the French, first by Delacroix and later by the Impressionists. Most recently Lucian Freud has paid homage to an intensity as turbulent as his own. But when the contents of Constable's studio were auctioned after his death he had not yet made the impression he hoped for - 29 of the cloud and sky studies sold for £3/11 shillings.
A second edition of Brian Lynch's novel, The Winner of Sorrow, has just been published by New Island
John Constable: A Kingdom of His Own By Anthony Bailey Chatto and Windus, 366pp. £17.99