Arte: For love or money
John Constable is not known for his portraits. The human figure, when it appears in his shimmering agricultural landscapes, tends to be turned away from the viewer - the river-logged carter in The Hay Wain, the boy gulping from the stream in The Cornfield. Yet Constable had a thriving career in painting faces. Over the course of 40 years he produced perhaps 100 portraits of men, women, children and family groups. Most were done for money, some for love. And while not all of them achieved greatness, a new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London reveals that Constable was no hack when it came to the tricky business of capturing individuals on canvas.
Lucian Freud names Constable's portraits as one of his abiding influences, and you can see why. Constable's people stare out at the viewer with the kind of authenticity that could only come from the artist's intimate knowledge of their personal past. These are not grandstanding pieces, designed to advertise the sitter's wealth and status. They are affectionate snapshots of men and women from the rising middle classes, the kind of people Constable had known from birth. Here, perhaps, is the reason why they have tended to fade from view in comparison with the "six footers" - the spectacularly large essays in landscape that made his name as one of the great English artists of the 19th century. Indeed, his portraiture has been so overlooked that Constable Portraits: The Painter and His Circle is the first exhibition of its kind, anywhere in the world.
Then again, Constable's path towards professional and personal fulfilment was always slow. He was born in 1776, the second son of Golding Constable, a prosperous grain merchant from the Essex-Suffolk border. Over the previous generation, the family business had expanded from the watermill at Flatford to become a thriving transport business boasting a fleet of barges and an ocean-going ship. No one would mistake the Constables for gentry, but their large new house at East Bergholt and increasingly comfortable way of living announced that here were people keen to make their mark.
While the flat, agricultural land bisected by the River Stour might strike others as workaday, to the young John it was a kind of Eden. In years to come he recalled the scenes of his "careless boyhood" which had first inspired him to become a painter, adding that he had "often thought of pictures of them before I had ever touched a pencil". During his long adult absences in London, it was to these fertile plains and tidy farm buildings that he returned in his imagination, forging from them an art that strove to be lyrical yet truthful. Not for him the melancholic ruins, high peaks and stormy skies of an earlier Romantic generation. Many contemporaries dismissed Constable's landscapes as unfinished, mistaking their determined naturalism for lack of care. It was not until the mid-20th century that his vision of the East Anglian countryside on the cusp of industrialisation saturated the public's imagination, eventually becoming a kind of stand-in for Englishness itself.
The Constables were reluctant to let their son become any kind of painter, particularly one specialising in landscape, a genre that lacked both profitability and prestige. History painting, in which scenes from the recent and antique past were recreated in heroic splendour, was the kind of thing they would have preferred for their John. Sir Joshua Reynolds, the president of the Royal Academy, consistently extolled it as the highest branch of painting and, to the canny Constables, this suggested that large pictures of men in sandals could be made to pay. Hayfields and heavy-bottomed barges, the kind of thing you could see from your kitchen window, did not sound promising.
Young Constable, though, would not bend, and the few examples that remain of his historic and religious art suggest he was right to steer clear of a genre for which he had no natural feeling. Portraiture, though, might be a way to compromise between parental prudence and youthful passion. As the Constables worried over the future of their art-mad son, now pushing into his 20s, they would have been aware of the promising example of Thomas Gainsborough. A local Suffolk artist, Gainsborough had managed to make a good living from combining portraiture with landscape. Then there were George Romney and John Opie, the sons of a Lancashire builder and a Cornish carpenter respectively, both of whom had risen to great prominence as fashionable portraitists. Could John not do something similar? It is this nagging parental voice which one hears behind the painter's later recollection that his father was always anxious to see him "engaged in Portrait", whereas he had never had any doubts that "Landscape is my mistress - 'tis to her I look for fame".
Constable's first portraits came about as the result of strenuous parental networking. The earliest major piece to survive is The Bridges Family of 1804. George Bridges, the father, was a banker and held the lease of the port of Mistley, where Golding rented a quay. He was exactly the kind of person that the Constables would feel they could tap for a commission on their son's behalf. It is no surprise that the resulting painting feels stiff and awkward, especially when one learns that young Constable was obliged to stay at the Bridges family home in Essex for several weeks while working on it. Two preliminary drawings of the daughters gathered around the harpsichord are significantly livelier than the finished painting, in which 10 separate figures are grouped lumpenly together, apparently refusing to make eye contact. These uneven results reveal a key aspect of Constable's attitude to portraiture. When he liked the people he was painting (indeed, he developed a crush on the elder Miss Bridges), the results were fluid and filled with natural high spirits. When he was indifferent to his sitters (middle-aged men failed to engage him unless they were close personal friends), the portraits tend to come out flat and dull.
One sitter with whom Constable was always engaged was Maria Bicknell, the young woman whom he courted over seven anxious years. The granddaughter of the wealthy rector of East Bergholt, Maria was considered by everyone, including Constable's own parents, to be quite out of his reach. Marriage between the two would be impossible unless John could demonstrate an ability to provide a healthy income (and even then there was the sticking point that he belonged to "trade", while she was unequivocally "gentry"). Tender longing shines through Constable's portrait of Maria, done in July 1816, just at the point when he resolved to marry her without further delay. The piece glows with love for its beautiful, intelligent subject, a young woman whom he had first met when she was 12 and he 24. Constable took the portrait with him everywhere, using it as a substitute for the girl herself when they were parted. "I am sitting before your portrait," he wrote during a solo visit to East Bergholt, "which, when I took off the paper, is so extremely like that I can hardly help going up to it. I never had an idea before of the real pleasure that a portrait could offer." This likeness, he told her, calmed his spirit "under all trouble", and was placed next to his bed so that it was the last thing he saw at night and the first thing he saw on waking in the morning.
Love, though, was never going to be enough. Constable needed to pursue portraiture aggressively if he was to prove himself a viable suitor to the Bicknells. Several commissions, especially those for more socially prominent sitters, crop up repeatedly in his letters to Maria. But while these paintings are anxiously mentioned as evidence of his solvency, the finished works reveal his unsuitability for formal portraiture. His painting of Rear-Admiral Western of Tattingstone Park was an attempt to do the kind of heroic full-length naval portrait that chimed with the patriotic times (Britain, after all, was in the process of beating Bonaparte). Instead, Constable produced a rather uncomfortable-looking middle-aged man whose legs seem to belong to someone else's body. And although the young artist was dutifully aware that this was the sort of commission he should be tackling from a professional point of view, still he could not help smirking from behind Western's back. "I must procure a supply of the crimson, ruddy and purple tints and of the deepest dye," he wrote naughtily to Maria, on the matter of depicting the admiral's weather-blown complexion.
Constable was not alone in regarding portraiture as a kind of hackwork, undertaken to pay the bills and buy time for more important art. Gainsborough considered his main source of income to be "picking pockets in the portrait way", while his heart, like Constable's, belonged to landscape. Even Thomas Lawrence, the greatest and most successful portraitist in Constable's lifetime, was heard to sigh: "I begin to be really uneasy at finding myself so harnessed and shackled to this dry mill-horse business." Constable once observed that "painting is but another word for feeling" - an attitude that was problematic when his overriding feeling about the people he was painting tended towards indifference tinged with resentment.
In the end, it was not portraiture but lucky timing that brought Constable's protracted courtship of Maria Bicknell to a happy close. Golding Constable's death in 1816 resulted in a legacy that allowed the young couple to marry 16 years after they had first set eyes on one another. No one from her family attended the service. Yet the pictures Constable made of his wife and their young family in the years immediately following speak of pure contentment. He later described these years as the "five happiest and most interesting" of his life, and that feeling is strong in such pictures as Maria Constable with Two of her Children or the recently discovered Child in a Garden. Others in this group show a child, probably their second son Charles Golding, playing with a toy cart. Then there is a woman, almost certainly Maria, in the garden, parasol at the ready to shield her from the noonday heat. Here is everyday happiness, dashed down on paper, made all the more poignant by the knowledge that the Constables' married life was to last for just 12 years. In 1828 Maria would succumb to the Bicknell family scourge, consumption.
It was in the year after the birth of his first child, when he still had a limited income, that Constable made the most sustained effort of his career to develop a professional practice as a portrait painter. In a short period, 1817-18, he produced some of his finest work of this type, which includes pictures of the Rev Dr John Wingfield, the family trio of Mrs Tuder, Mrs Edwards and the Rev Dr William Walker, Mrs James Pulham Snr, the Rev Dr James Andrew and Mrs James Andrew, along with John Fisher, Bishop of Salisbury. Most of these portraits are executed on what would become his favourite three-quarters-size canvas (so called because its width stretched to about three-quarters of a yard). These dimensions enabled him to place the torso and head of the sitter comfortably within the confines of the picture plane, with very little in the way of extra space for props. It also meant that he was absolved from having to paint the sitter's hands, something he found extraordinarily difficult (when hands do appear in his portraits, they tend to resemble lifeless hams). The overall lack of distraction in a typical Constable portrait means that most of the viewer's attention is drawn to the sitter's upper body and facial expression. In the case of Mrs Pulham, Edwards and Tuder, these are wonderfully done. All three ladies are presented in their Sunday best, trussed up proudly in rustling silks and satins that announce their comparative wealth. So, too, their middle-aged faces, complete with double chins, speak of a satisfied prosperity that stops the right side of smug. Constable, you feel, is not laughing at these women who, after all, bear striking similarities to his own mother and trio of sisters. Instead he paints them with a fond familiarity that refuses to flatter. As the art critic William Feaver has observed, any of them could have stepped straight out of a novel by Jane Austen or George Eliot.
On those rare occasions when the decision was made to crowd a portrait with extra props, the result is stodgy and dull. The Rev Dr James Andrew, painted by Constable around the same time, is shown with his left hand leaning on a pile of books, presumably ones he had written himself on astronomy, nautical tables and grammar. The idea to include these status symbols possibly came from the good doctor himself, and the result is a dull essay in bourgeois self-importance.
At the same time as Constable was undertaking this group of portraits, he started working on the "six footer" landscapes by which we know him today. This was a huge gamble financially, especially when one considers that, from 1825, when he completed The Leaping Horse, none of his large landscapes managed to sell. What is more, no matter how many legacies Constable and Maria might accrue - after Golding Constable's bequest came two more substantial inheritances, from her father and grandfather - there was never quite enough money to support their seven children. Constable therefore continued to accept portrait commissions during the second half of his life. Indeed, nearly half of the 100 or so portraits he is known to have painted date from the years following his marriage.
One intriguing question remains. It seems likely that many of Constable's sitters sat for their portraits in his Bloomsbury house. As these men and women trooped up to the upper-floor studio, did they perhaps glance into the corner and notice one of his half-finished renderings of the East Anglian landscape that no one wanted? And, if they did, what ran through their minds? They possibly thought of these scrappy monsters as pure indulgence, the kind of thing an artist fiddled with in the evening when the important money-making work of the day was done. After all, they would have said to themselves as they settled comfortably into the proffered chair, John Constable was a portrait painter, and a good one too. The whole landscape business was always going to remain a hobby. Everyone knew that.
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