The Wordsworth of Landscape

By ROBERT HUGHES

At the Metropolitan, a retrospective of Constable's Arcadia

John Constable (1776-1837) remains the great example of the Englishness of English art. In his work even God is an Englishman. What other deity could have created those ripe interfolding fields, that mildly blowing air, that dewy sparkle on the face of a static world? Constable did to the perception of landscape in paint what William Wordsworth did to it in verse: he threw out the allegorical fauna that had infested it since Milton and the rococo--nymphs, satyrs, dryads, Vergilian shepherds and Ovidian spring deities--and substituted Natural Vision for the Pathetic Fallacy.

Between them, Constable and J.M.W. Turner define the supreme achievements of landscape painting in Europe in the first half of the 19th century, but Constable was by temperament incapable of reaching for Turner's ever mutating rhetoric of sublime effects. His work was more staid, more modest, less conspicuously "inventive." Painting, he considered, was "a branch of natural philosophy, of which my pictures are but the experiments." From Nicholas Milliard's Elizabethan miniatures through Rupert Brooke's pastoral poetry, a deep love of the particulars of landscape, nose thrust in the hedgerow, has always been central to English culture. No wonder, then, that Constable's following is large and loyal. His landscape is just what the English feel nostalgic for as they dodge trucks on the bypass amid the billboards and concrete goosenecks. It is conservatism writ in leaves and wheat.

Constable has always had an American following too, but the exhibition of 64 of his paintings and oil sketches that went on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City last week is the first such "retrospective" in the U.S. for 30 years. It is, necessarily, a modest affair compared with the immense Constable show at the Tate Gallery in 1976, which was the kind of exhibition that defines the image of an artist for a generation. Many favorites are not here, starting with The Hay Wain, the most reproduced landscape in English painting--a sort of vegetative Mona Lisa. But the show was curated by the world's leading Constable specialist, Graham Reynolds, formerly of London's Victoria and Albert Museum, and it serves as a delightful refresher course for those who know Constable and a brilliant introduction for those who do not.

Peace, security, the untroubled enjoyment of unproblematic Nature: such is the main motif of Constable's work. One might suppose that it would have made him popular in his lifetime, but English connoisseurs were far more receptive to Turner, the romantic with wider moods and more liberal feelings. An archconservative who longed for institutional acceptance but was denied it most of his life--he was not elected to the Royal Academy until age 52, and even then he had the humiliation of seeing his first entry as a member to its annual show rejected by his colleagues--Constable did not have the knack of getting on with clients or fellow artists. He was timid, prickly, complacent and sardonic by turns. "Why, this is not drawing, but inspiration?' exclaimed William Blake over one of his tree studies. "I never knew it before," Constable snapped. "I meant it for drawing."

At times, in his copious letters, one senses the veerings and fragile boastfulness of a manic-depressive. He was not a sociable painter, which at least saved him from being a society artist; he disliked painting people, though he turned out quite a few routine portraits of country-seats. In his emotional uncertainty and fear of change, he was the stuff of which rank-and-file Tories are made. He did not so much idealize stability as worship it, and as a result his entire view of rural England presents Arcadia in a new guise. One could never imagine, looking at his paintings of Dedham Vale and the River Stour, that the placid shires of the 1820s and '30s looked very different to the writer and reformer William Cobbett, that they were full of rick burners, machine breakers, hanging judges and posses of brutal yeomanry.

The most Arcadian picture in this show is Wivenhoe Park, Essex, 1816, almost the last word on Eden-as-Property. The enameled lawns and bulky cows, the relaxed zigzag of planes leading the eye toward the pink villa, the swans and fishermen riding on a serene sheet of water stitched with silver light: this is the epitome of civilized landscape. Like the best work of Jacob van Ruisdael, the 17th century Dutchman whom Constable considered a master of "natural" vision, Wivenhoe Park manages to be both real and ideal; it is a powerful (though subdued) instrument of fantasy as well as an exact rendition of General Rebow's family seat.

Constable was a painter of substance, not fantasy; but imagination rises through the substance. His earliest childhood memories, the elements of his genetic code as a painter, were all about the weight and noise and feel of things he grew up with as a well-off son of a watermill owner in Suffolk, on the River Stour. "The sound of water escaping from Mill dams . . . willows, Old rotten Banks, slimy posts, and brickwork. I love such things," he wrote to a friend. "They made me a painter (and I am grateful) . . . I had often thought of pictures of them before I had ever touched a pencil."

No wonder that, in a painter with so pronounced a taste for the specific, there was a constant argument between stereotypes and things seen. Constable loved his masters: Claude Lorrain, Ruisdael, Gaspard Poussin. Some of his most delectable paintings, such as The Cornfield, 1826, rely on the Claudean use of dark repoussoir trees framing a view of bright space at the center, and this can make them too charming to a modern eye. Constable himself remarked that The Cornfield "has certainly got a little more eyesalve than I usually condescend to give." But the great fact of nature, as Benjamin West had pointed out to Constable, was change. Shadows, vapors, clouds, the dewiness of grass in the morning, the dryness of leaves in the evening: nothing is fixed in a schema. Constable became convinced that he must overcome the stasis that convention and idealism produce in art: his project would then be, as he put it, "to arrest the more abrupt and transient appearances of the Chiaroscuro in Nature . . . to give 'to one brief moment, caught from fleeting time' a lasting and sober existence..."

Hence the hundreds of studies of clouds and sky and rain squalls, the sifting of light down on Hampstead Heath, the endless particularations (never meant to be exhibited as final pictures) of small divisions of time, no two of which were the same. And hence, above all, the quality of Constable's mature work that seems so puzzlingly modern, a prediction of impressionism: the thick paint. By his late years he was piling it on with a palette knife in higher and higher tones, all the way up to pure flake white, in an effort to render the broken luminosity he saw in nature. There are moments when one feels the subject needs disinterring from the mass of pigment, but the expressive gains were sometimes enormous.

Never more so than in Hadleigh Castle, 1829. Constable brought to his view of the castle (which overlooks the Thames estuary) a pressure of melancholy: he was painting this desolate shore from memory, and his beloved wife Maria had just died of consumption. The paint is crusted, layer over layer, like mortar; even the grass and mallows in the foreground seem fossilized, and the broken tower--taller in art than in life--has an Ossianic misery to it. Then one's eye escapes to the horizon, glittering with scumbled white light, like a promise of resurrection. The whole image is as intense as anything in Turner: "melancholy grandeur," as Constable put it, the very essence of Romanticism and thus one of the key images of the English imagination. --By Robert Hughes This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.