When God Was an Englishman

By ROBERT HUGHES

Englishmen both, Joseph Mallord William Turner and John Constable were the supreme landscapists of the early 19th century: Turner with his vortexes of air and toppling seas, Constable with his images of the domestic countryside, "a branch of natural philosophy, of which my pictures are but the experiments." Both lived through the Industrial Revolution and experienced the strains it exerted on the fabric of English society. Both stood on the threshold of the modern world. But Turner's delight in extremity, the catastrophic sublime rising from a deep instinctive pessimism, makes him appear a "modern" artist--perhaps the first. Not Constable. His green distances and slowly turning water mills, his amiable valleys and serene horizons banked with cumulus seem the last of what was passing, not the first of what was to come.

Whole Man. But categorizing is not that easy. We know Turner's world better than Constable's, or think we do, especially after the splendid Turner retrospective at London's Royal Academy (TIME, Dec. 23, 1974). Now, the same service has been done for Constable, with an exhibition of 335 of his paintings, drawings and watercolors, organized for the Tate Gallery in London by three art historians, Leslie Parris, Ian Fleming-Williams and Conal Shields. It celebrates Constable's 200th birthday and is the largest showing of his work ever. For the first time, one can see the whole man under one roof--from the juvenilia (a graffito he scratched on a beam in the family mill when he was 16) and memorabilia, to the grand series of 6-ft. landscapes he painted in the 1820s and '30s. These include The Hay Wain, The Leaping Horse, Salisbury Cathedral, from the Meadows, Hadleigh Castle. In them Constable did to the perception of landscape in paint what Wordsworth had done to it in verse.

There are painters who carry their childhood experience all their lives. It forms the genetic code, the inescapable structure, of their work. Constable was one. He was born in Suffolk, where his father owned water mills on the River Stour. He lived a life of blameless bourgeois obscurity, alternating between London and the Suffolk countryside with his wife Maria Bicknell, who bore him seven children. At 45, he wrote to a friend: "The sound of water escaping from Mill dams ... willows, Old rotten Banks, slimy posts, & brickwork. I love such things ... I should paint my own places best--Painting is but another word for feeling. I associate my 'careless boyhood' to all that lies on the banks of the Stour. They made me a painter (and I am grateful) ... I had often thought of pictures of them before I had ever touched a pencil."

His childhood was substance rather than fantasy: tactile memories of mold, mud, woodgrain and brick became some of the most "painterly" painting in the history of art. The foreground of The Leaping Horse is all matter, and the things in it--squidgy earth, tangled weeds and wild flowers, prickle of light on the dark skin of water sliding over a hidden ledge--are troweled and spattered on with ecstatic gusto.

This is the landscape of touch. In Hadleigh Castle, c. 1829--a gloomy ruin at the mouth of the Thames, painted around the time of his wife's death from consumption--Constable's tactility reaches its extreme. A cowherd and his collie are encrusted blobs, identical in substance to the rocks, the ruin, the clouds; liquid or scumbled, the tossing white brush marks in the sky have a resolutely material quality for which there were no parallels in European painting.

He was, in short, an intensely specific artist. Specificity did not come easily, for any landscapist practicing around 1800 faced a battery of required stereotypes--chiefly the pastoral landscape with framing trees and unified brown tone, in the manner of Claude or Gaspard Poussin. Time and again, we see Constable glancing at the formula, using it, sheering off. He writes in 1803, the year of his Royal Academy debut: "I have been running after pictures and seeking the truth at second hand . . I shall shortly return to Bergholt where I shall make some laborious studies from nature -- and I shall endeavour to get a pure and unaffected representation of the scenes ..."

This was not a simple process, and one would caricature Constable's achievement by treating it as a linear journey from style to reality. What he knew of art constantly modified what he saw in nature. But the balance he struck between these terms, in his fin est paintings, was quite new. Only the gentleness of the subjects -- those mellow distances which, a century and a half later, seem like the never-never land of Arcady -- veils it from us. It amounted to a prediction of impressionism, 40 years ahead. It was an attempt, as Constable put it, "to arrest the more abrupt and transient appearances of the Chiaroscuro in Nature, to shew its effect in the most striking manner, to give 'to one brief moment, caught from fleeting time' a lasting and sober existence ..."

From then on Constable became immersed in small divisions of time: in mo ments no two of which were the same.

Hence his sheaves of cloud studies, done from observations on Hampstead Heath. He did not use the broken col ors and blue shadows which, after a century of impressionism, we still imagine as necessary for telling a truth about light. A work like Dedham Lock and Mill, c. 1819, is straight tonal painting.

Yet it would be hard to imagine a more succinctly truthful rendering of light on water and young grass. Here, Constable's "scientific" or descriptive impulse joins with the aesthetic in a moment of pragmatic freshness: not much painting looks as modern in 1976 as this must have looked in 1819.

Virginal and Dense. But for all that, Constable still wanted to paint landscapes like an old master in the line of Gainsborough, Ruysdael and Rubens.

Hence the big machines, like The Hay Wain. Hence, too, an unfamiliar -- be cause privately owned -- masterpiece, Salisbury Cathedral, from the Meadows, c. 1831. In the afterstorm light, the spire and facade of the cathedral show silver against slate roof, and the clouds are like marble. The cathedral sits inside the rainbow's curve as though in a proscenium arch. Then one sees how every element (building, rainbow, sky, the tree on the left and the cart) is linked by one startling device: the tree, turning on the hub of the cartwheel like an immense brush, seems to have drawn the arc of t rainbow across the sky, unveiling the cathedral as it goes. Every surface -- the mudguards of the cart no less than the slowly sliding water -- sparkles with a whitish impasto, virginal and dense.

Constable offers us a world both monumental and newly minted. In it, God is an Englishman.

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