Master painter - John Constable

The troubled Constable

Gerald Isaaman reveals the torments of a great but unrecognised artist

JOHN Constable (1776-1837) had a tough time. He had two prime aims in life: to prove he was a master painter, to prove his love for his wife and family. However, as is so often the cruel case of true talent, he never achieved public acclaim in his lifetime and died a sad, grumpy but not yet old man at his studio in Charlotte Street, Fitzrovia.
He was partly to blame. One of the deterrents to the success in the accepted society he craved for was his own demanding, sometimes dark and depressing personality, not so obvious in his youth when he started out as the handsome son of a prosperous East Bergholt corn merchant, expected then to run the family business.
Constable had a mean, sarcastic tongue that won him few friends.
He also painted enormous often idyllic landscapes when pictures with historical themes were in vogue, and he suffered too the sickening snobs of the Royal Academy.
They resorted to nepotism rather than acknowledge Constable’s genius and he laboured to make a living without the confidence of having RA attached to his name until late in life.
Yet, apart from a few faithful friends and support from France, he suffered slurs over the decades following his burial, in a tucked away corner of Hampstead Parish Churchyard, his fame leaping up and down.
It took a campaign launched by me to pay for the Constable family grave to be refurbished, the art establishment and the likes of English Heritage slow in taking positive interest.
And as you walk past No 40 Well Walk, the main house in Hampstead where Constable lived, so close to the Heath whose skies he abducted for remarkable examination and experimentation, and where his beloved wife, Maria, died in his arms, there is no indication still of its place in history, apart from one blue plaque.
Yet, thankfully, we now have two events to help promote Constable.
Just visit the magnificent exhibition at Tate Britain and you will experience the shock and awe of Constable art, the Tate uniting six of Constable’s Six Footers with, uniquely alongside them, the equally large oil sketches he made in preparation that simply take your breath away.
This is a show of supreme and subtle skill that gives Constable his rightful place in any pantheon of art.
There are a couple of Hampstead paintings on view, notably Hampstead Heath with Rainbow, bequeathed by his family, a poignant reminder of the fact that there are no Constables in local collections.
The second event is the publication of John Constable: A Kingdom of His Own (Chatto and Windus, £17.99), the first full-length life of Constable since 1843, written by Anthony Bailey with consummate insight, his sympathy for his subject, cautioned with hard detail of the artist’s faults.
Hampstead played a vital part in Constable’s life, so too Fitzrovia, where he had studios in Keppel Street and Charlotte Street, and Bailey brings the local scene to life with such compelling ease and style that you warm to the man despite his obstinacy.
Indeed, it is hard to realise that The Hay Wain failed to sell when completed, a blow as awful as when Constable was refused entry to the Royal Academy. Even so, he retained his abundant self-belief on that occasion, declaring: “I have nothing to help me but my stark naked merit, and although that (as I am told) exceeds all the other candidates – it is not heavy enough.”
Typically, when Constable died unexpectedly, probably from a heart attack following rheumatic fever, his work was sold off like a boot sale, raising a grand total of £648 12s 6d, some 29 of his Hampstead cloud and sky studies fetching just £3 11s.
As Bailey faithfully reports: “Constable’s coffin was laid in the tomb alongside Maria’s. Some of the mourners noted again the Latin lines he had borrowed from Dr Gooch and had inscribed for her on the stone side of the tomb:
Alas! From how slender a thread hangs all that is sweetest in life.”

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