Pictures Every Child Should Know Part 4

Though things were going very well with him, it was not until Paris discovered him that he achieved great success. In 1824 he painted two large pictures which he took to Paris, and there he found fame. The best landscape painting in France dates from the time when Constable's works were hung in the Louvre, to become the delight of all art-lovers.

He received a gold medal from Charles X., and became more honoured abroad than he had ever been at home.

Constable had many enemies, and made many more after he became an Academician. Some artists, who would have liked that honour and who could not gain it for themselves, declared that Constable painted "with a palette knife," though it certainly would not have mattered if he had, since he made great pictures.

He painted things exactly as he saw them, and was not a popular artist. Most of all, he loved to paint the scenes that he had known so well in his youth, and he did them over and over again, as if the subject was one in which he wished to reach perfection.

When he died he left a picture, "Arundel Castle and Mill," standing with its paint wet upon his easel for he pa.s.sed away very suddenly, on April 1st, leaving behind him many unsold paintings.

He was a sensitive chap, and throughout his youth was greatly distressed by the differences of opinion between himself and his father. He was torn asunder between a sense of duty and his own wish to be an artist; and his greatest consolation in this situation was in the friends.h.i.+p he had formed for a plumber, who, like himself, dearly loved art. The plumber's name was John Dunthorne, and the two men wandered about the country, when not employed at their regular work, and together, by streams and in fields, painted the same scenes. At one time they hired a little room in the neighbouring village which they made into a studio. Constable was a handsome fellow in his youth and was known to all as the "handsome miller." His father, the yeoman farmer with the windmills, was also a miller.

In London he became acquainted with one John Smith, known as "Antiquity Smith," who taught him something of etching. After he was recalled to his father's business, his mother wrote to "Antiquity Smith," that she hoped John "would now attend to business, by which he will please me and his father, and ensure his own respectability and comfort"--a complete expression of the middle-cla.s.s British mind. Her satisfaction was short-lived, for her son soon returned to London.

When his first pictures were rejected by the Royal Academy he showed one of them to Sir Benjamin West, who said hopefully: "Don't be disheartened, young man, we shall hear of you again; you must have loved nature very much before you could have painted this."

About that time he tried to paint many kinds of pictures, such as portraits and sacred subjects, but he did not seem to succeed in anything except the scenes of his boyhood, which he truly loved. Hence he gave up attempting that which he could do only pa.s.sably, and kept to what he could do supremely well.

When his friends wished him to continue portrait painting, the only thing that was well paid at that time, Constable wrote: "You know I have always succeeded best with my native scenes. They have always charmed me, and I hope they always will. I have now a path marked out very distinctly for myself, and I am desirous of pursuing it uninterruptedly."

About the time he fell in love and before his father's death, his health began to fail, and the young woman's mother would have none of him. Her father was in favour of Constable, but he could not hold out against the chance of his daughter losing her grandfather's fortune by marrying the wrong man.

The lady was not so distractingly in love as young Constable was, and she did not entirely like the idea of poverty, even with John, so she held off, and with so much anxiety Constable became downright ill. For five years the pair lived apart, and then the artist and the young woman, whose name was Maria Bicknell, lost their mothers about the same time, This drew them very closely together; and to help the matter on, John's attendance upon his father in his last illness brought him to the same town as Miss Bicknell. After his father's death, he urged the young lady so strongly to be his wife that she consented They were married and her father soon forgave her, but not so her grandfather, who declared that he never would forgive her, but he really must have done so from the first, for when he died it was found that he had left her a little fortune of ?4,000. This was about the same amount the artist had received from his father, so that they were able to get on very well.

After Constable's marriage he went on a visit to Sir George Beaumont, and there an amusing incident occurred which is known to-day as the story of Sir George's "brown tree." It seems that Constable's ideas of colour for his landscapes were so true to nature that a good many people did not approve of them, and one day while painting, Sir George declared that the colour of an old Cremona fiddle was the best model of colour tone that a landscape could have. Constable's only answer was to place the fiddle on the green lawn in front of the house. At another time his host asked the artist, "Do you not find it very difficult to determine where to place your brown tree?" "Not at all,"

was Constable's reply, "for I never put such a thing into a picture in my life."

In painting one picture many times he declared, "Its light cannot be put out because it is the light of nature." A Frenchman called attention to one of his pictures thus: "Look at these landscapes by an Englishman. The ground appears to be covered with dew."

Notwithstanding the little fortune of his wife and himself, Constable was not quite carefree, because he had to raise a good sized family of six children so that when his wife's father died and left his daughter ?20,000 he said to a friend: "Now I shall stand before a six-foot canvas with a mind at ease, thank G.o.d!" In the very midst of this happiness, his beloved wife became ill with consumption, and was certain to die. He no longer cared very much for life and wrote very sadly:

"I have been ill, but am endeavouring to get work again, and could I get afloat upon a canvas of six feet, I might have a chance of being carried from myself." When he became a member of the Royal Academy, he said: "It has been delayed until I am solitary and cannot impart it,"

meaning that without his dear wife to share his good fortune, it seemed an empty honour to him.

Strange things are told which show how little his work was valued by his countrymen. After he had become a member of the Academy one of his small pictures was entered but rejected; n.o.body knowing anything about it. It was put on one side among the "outsiders." Finally, one of his fellow members glancing at it was attracted.

"Stop a bit! I rather like that. Why not say 'doubtful'?" Later Constable acknowledged the picture as his, and then they wished to hang it, but he refused to let them. Another Academy story is about his picture "Hadleigh Castle." On Varnis.h.i.+ng Day, Chartney, a brilliant critic, told Constable that the foreground of the picture was "too cold," and so he undertook to "warm it," by giving it a strong glaze with asphaltum with Constable's brush which he s.n.a.t.c.hed from the artist's hand. Constable gazed at him in horror. "Oh! there goes all my dew," he cried, and when Chartney's back was turned he hurriedly wiped the "warmth" all away and got back his "dew."

Even the amusing things that happened to him, seem to have a little sadness about them. He wrote to a friend: "Beechey was here yesterday, and said: 'Why d--n it Constable, what a d--n fine picture you are making; but you look d--n ill, and you've got a d--n bad cold!' so,"

added Constable, "you have evidence on oath of my being about a fine picture and that I am looking ill."

An ill.u.s.tration of his painstaking and truthfulness to nature is that he once took home with him from a visit bottles of coloured sand and fragments of stone which he meant to introduce into a picture; and on pa.s.sing some slimy posts near a mill, he said to his host, "I wish you could cut those off and send their tops to me."

Constable was a loyal friend, the most persistent of men, and several anecdotes are told of his characteristics. His friend Fisher said to him:

"Where real business is to be done, you are the most energetic and punctual of men. In smaller matters, such as putting on your breeches, you are apt to lose time in deciding which leg shall go in first."

PLATE--THE HAY WAIN

This picture was first called "Landscape," and it was painted in 1821. In his letters about it, however, Constable also called it "Noon," and others wrote of it as "Midsummer Noon." This tells us what a wealth of hot sunlight is suggested by the painting.

It shows a little farmhouse upon the bank of a stream, a spot well known as "w.i.l.l.y Lott's Cottage." The owner had been born there and he died there eighty-eight years later, without ever having left his cottage for four whole days in all those years. Upon the tombstone of Lott, which is in the Bergholt burial ground, his epitaph calls the house "Gibeon Farm." It was a favourite scene with Constable, and he painted it many times from every side. It is the same house we see in the "Mill Stream," another Constable painting, and again in "Valley Farm." In this last picture he painted the side opposite to the one shown in the "Hay Wain."

The stream near which the house stands spreads out into a ford, and in the picture the hay cart, with two men upon it, is pa.s.sing through the ford. The horses are decked out with red ta.s.sels. On the right of the stream there is a broad meadow, golden green in the sunlight, "with groups of trees casting cool shadows on the gra.s.s, and backed by a distant belt of woodland of rich blues and greens." On the right is a fisherman, half hidden by a bush, standing near his punt.

Constable wrote to his friend, Fisher, "My picture goes to the Academy on the tenth." This was written on April 1st, 1821. "It is not so grand as Tinney's." This shows us, that Constable had not vanity enough to interfere with his self-criticism. Again in a letter written to him by a friend: "How does the 'Hay Wain' look now it has got into your own room again?" adding that he wished to see it there, away from the Academy which to him was always "like a great pot of boiling varnish."

Later Fisher wrote: "I have a great desire to possess your 'Wain,' but I cannot now reach what it is worth;" and he begged Constable not to sell it without giving him a chance to try once more to raise the money to buy it. He wrote that the picture would become of greater value to his children if the artist left it hanging upon the walls of the Academy, "till you join the society of Ruysdael, Wilson, and Claude. As praise and money will then be of no value to you, the world will liberally bestow both."

Later a Frenchman wished to buy it for exhibition purposes, and when Constable wrote to Fisher of this, his friend replied that he had better sell it to the Frenchman "for the sake of the _?clat_ it may give you. The stupid English public, which has no judgment of its own, will begin to think there is something in it if the French make your works national property. You have long lain under a mistake; men do not purchase pictures because they admire them, but because others covet them."

Finally, the "Hay Wain" was sold to the French dealer for ?250, and Constable threw in a picture of Yarmouth for good measure. Later a friend declared that he had created a good deal of argument about landscape painting, and that there had come to be two divisions, for he had practically founded a new school. He received a gold medal for the "Hay Wain," and the French nation tried to buy it. In the Louvre are "The Cottage," "Weymouth Bay," and "The Glebe Farm." Elsewhere are "Hampstead Heath," "Salisbury Cathedral," "The Lock on the Stour,"

"Dedham Mill," "The Valley Farm," "Gillingham Mill," "The Cornfield,"

"Boat-Building," "Flatford Mill on the River Stour," besides many others.

IX

JOHN SINGLETON COPLEY

_English School_ 1737-1815

A little boy with a squirrel was the first picture that pointed this artist toward fame and that was painted in England and exhibited at the Society of Arts.

This American-born Irishman had no family or ancestry of account, but he himself was to become the father of Lord Chancellor Lyndhurst, and he did some truly fine things in art.

About the same time America had another painter, Benjamin West, marked out for fame, but he got his start in Europe while Copley had already become a successful artist before he left Boston, his native place.

He liked best to paint "interiors"--rooms with fine furniture and curtains, women in fine clothing and men in embroidered waistcoats and bejewelled buckles.

In 1777 he got into the Royal Academy, and on the whole had considerable influence on European art. If we study the portraits that he painted while in Boston, we can get a very complete idea of the surroundings of the "Royalists" at the time of our colonial history.

PLATE--THE COPLEY FAMILY GROUP

In this picture there are seven figures with an open landscape forming the background. The baby of the family plays, with uplifted arms, upon grandfather's knee. The mother on the couch, surrounded by her three other children, is kissing one while another clings to her. Before her stands a prim little maid, gowned in the fas.h.i.+on of grown-folks of her day. A little lock of hair falling upon her forehead suggests that when she was good she was very, very good, and when she was bad she was horrid! She wears a little cap. At the back is the artist himself in a wig and other fas.h.i.+ons of the time. A great column rises behind him, forming a part of the architecture or the landscape, one hardly knows which in so artificially constructed a picture.

Copley painted also John Hanc.o.c.k, Judge Graham, Jeremiah Lee, and General Joseph Warren.

X

JEAN BAPTISTE CAMILLE COROT

(p.r.o.nounced Zhahn Bah-teest' Cah-mee'yel Coh'roh) _Fontainebleau-Barbizon School_ 1796-1875 _Pupil of Michallon_