Constable with church connections
CONSTABLE AND SALISBURY
The soul of landscape
May 20 - September 25 2011
Major Exhibition Galleries, Salisbury & South Wiltshire Museum
Constable’s most familiar paintings, such as ‘The Hay Wain’, are always associated with his home area of East Bergholt and Flatford, on the Essex/Suffolk border. However, this summer sees an exhibition of works made in and around Salisbury, where he also developed important personal connections. His many paintings and sketches of this area have never before been assembled as a single exhibition.
Unusually for a painter, most of Constable’s closest contacts were with men who had church connections. Of these, the most influential was Dr. John Fisher, the future Bishop of Salisbury. Dr. Fisher had been appointed Rector of Langham, near East Bergholt, in 1790. He was extremely well connected and, as a Canon of Windsor Castle, was on friendly terms with the royal family. Constable looked back on their meeting as a turning point in his life.
Constable was first invited to Salisbury In 1811, where he met the Bishop’s 23-year-old nephew, also named John Fisher, who was soon to be ordained. The two seem to have taken to each other immediately. Fisher, as the younger man, was an eager admirer of Constable’s work and ideas. Both shared ‘a deep strain of unaffected piety, in which the enjoyment of landscape was inextricably mixed with gratitude towards its Creator and which was not found to be inconsistent with a fund of healthy ribald humour’.
From a distance
Constable frequently painted Salisbury Cathedral from a distance, looking across the surrounding countryside. However, his most famous image, ‘Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s Grounds’, is a much closer view, commissioned by Bishop Fisher in 1823. The spire is framed by tall trees, and seen against a cloudy sky — a reminder of Constable’s interest in Dutch landscapes, especially those of Jacob van Ruisdael. However, the strong composition comes from his study of Claude Lorraine (1600-1682) He had opportunities to study Claude’s classical landscapes thanks to another important patron — the connoisseur Sir George Beaumont. Claude’s structured organisation of space acted as a framework for Constable’s personal observation of nature.
Sir Joshua Reynolds, President of the Royal Academy, commended Claude to his students as a painter who could transport the mind to higher things, conducting viewers into ‘the tranquillity of Arcadia; and the world of antiquity’. On the other hand, ‘...whatever is familiar, or in any way reminds us of what we see and hear every day, perhaps does not belong to the higher provinces of art, either in poetry or in painting’.
However, Constable never subscribed to false idealism. Although he loved Claude’s treatment of light, he was instinctively drawn to ordinary everyday scenes, and thus to the work of Ruisdael and the Dutch artists of the 17th century.
God’s second book
The Dutch writers and landscape painters understood nature as ‘God’s second book’, reflecting the Confession of Faith of the Netherlands Reformed Churches, where ‘all created things, both great and small, are like letters, which give us the invisible things of God to behold, namely his eternal power and divinity’. At the same time, changing seasons, decay and death are visual evidence of the Fall. Constable, with his farming background, would have immediately understood how the fertility of the land, with its annual cycle of work, reflects God’s providence in an uncertain world.
In English Romantic poetry of Constable’s time, the contemplation of landscape was also seen as being of moral value — as Wordsworth wrote:
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guardian of my heart, and soul
And all my moral being.
However, the poems of William Cowper were probably of greater personal importance to Constable. Cowper, having been converted in the early 1770s, was befriended by John Newton, then vicar of Olney, and a leader of the evangelical revival. His description of familiar scenes finds an echo in much of Constable’s correspondence:
Things must be beautiful, which daily viewed,
Please daily, and whose novelty survives
Long knowledge, and the scrutiny of years.
Bereavement
In November 1828, Constable lost his beloved wife Maria, after a long struggle with tuberculosis. Within four years, John Fisher, his closest friend and encourager, died at the age of only 43. Constable wrote: ‘We loved each other and confided in each other entirely … he was a good advisor, though impetuous, and he was a truly religious man’.
Constable’s later landscapes increasingly become a vehicle of expression for his personal grief. The most dramatic example is his painting of 1831, ‘Salisbury Cathedral with a Rainbow’. The looming clouds now reflect his own state of mind, and appear more personally threatening. He was clearly aware of this when he wrote: ‘…every gleam of sunshine is withdrawn from me, in the art at least. Can it be wondered at then, that I paint continual storms?’
But, against the clouds, Constable uses the Christian symbol of the rainbow, cutting across the darkness like a beam of hope. Despite his sense of loss, his letters show that he was not finally overwhelmed. Perhaps, in his personal struggles, he identified with the experiences of Cowper. Significantly, when he died unexpectedly during the night of March 31 1837, Robert Southey’s Life of Cowper was by his bedside.
Christian beliefs
It is in existing records of his lectures that we find Constable’s most direct statements about his Christian beliefs. He rarely articulated these in evangelical language (although this is evident in family letters, especially from two of his sisters). Through the Fishers, and possibly Sir George Beaumont, he seems to have moved towards a more intellectual form of Anglicanism. In his last lecture, he speaks eloquently of how the painter ‘must walk in the fields with a humble mind … I would say most emphatically to the student: ‘Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth’. He went on to read Milton’s moving description in Paradise Lost of the amazement of Adam, ‘his eyes opening for the first time on the wonders of the animate and inanimate world’ — and commended the study of landscape painting on the basis that ‘whatever leads us to the love and knowledge of our Creator leads us to him, and thus we become both wiser and better men’.
Anne Roberts,
Snettisham Christian Fellowship, Norfolk
