Maria with two of her children, c.1820. © Tate, London 2009
Exhibition Review - Constable Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, London, until June 14 2009.
As a group, the sitters for most of the portraiture work of one of our most renowned landscape painters belong to a stratum of early nineteenth century society seldom encountered in the major portraits of the period.
Constable Portraits: the Painter and his Circle offers a fascinating and valuable glimpse into this relatively modest arena of middle class privilege revealing a bucolic world of country squires, gentlemen and their wards, country vicars and assorted members of the aspiring Georgian country set.
It’s a world very much parallel to that of Constable’s contemporary, Jane Austen, and fans of Regency period literature – not to say TV costume dramas – should find the exhibition a vivid and absorbing evocation of the times.
The stories that emerge, of protracted courtship and marital bliss cut short by death are the stuff of a certain type of Regency era novel and visitors to this small exhibition will be charmed by these series of 50-odd truthful and quietly dignified portraits.
Mary Freer, 1809. © Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.Photo: Richard Caspole, Yale Center for British Art
They range from early formal portraits of Constable’s family and friends created when he was a young man trying to make his name as a painter, to modest commissions from businessmen and squires. There are also quick pencil and oil sketches of genteel family domesticity and vibrant three-quarter portraits that are wonderfully lively - full of the skilful brushwork found in his masterful later landscapes.
Constable was the second son of Golding and Ann Constable of East Bergholt in Suffolk – the countryside of which provided him with the inspiration for his greatest works. Initially we are told his parents opposed their son’s ambitions to be a painter – preferring he enter the family grain business or the clergy. But he remained quixotically determined to follow his calling.
The opening section is built around Constable’s family home and his early efforts to make his mark with a series of fresh and unpretentious portraits of his sisters, brother and two of his mill-owning father. One of the latter was recently identified as the ruddy-faced Golding Constable, thanks to some detective work by co-curators, Anne Lyles of Tate and the writer and critic Martin Gayford.
As part of the painstaking process of tracking down and verification that provides many of the paintings in the exhibition, they rediscovered it, together with a portrait of Constable’s mother, in the collection of Ipswich and Colchester Museums Service – erroneously identified as the artist’s schoolmaster.
Ann and Mary Constable, c. 1814. Reproduced by kind permission of the Trustees of the Portsmouth Estates. Photo Jeremy Whitaker
Beyond the family portraiture it soon emerges that the young Constable had a good painterly eye for the ladies, as evidenced by two stunning portraits of Thomasine Copping – unusually the maid of a local family – and Mary Freer who was the young ward of the dedicated but cantankerous (and we are told, overly attentive) Regency landowner Henry Grezwald Lewis who Constable visited in 1809.
Constable also had a great affinity with children but the two group portraits of sundry offspring of the lower aristocracy on display here pall next to his lively three quarter portraits of bluff English country gentlemen and their ladies.
Looking at them now there is a sense that these modest sitters are enjoying the experience of being painted and Constable really goes to town on the fabrics with his free and energetic brushwork.
But it is the personal stories of Constable’s life behind the portraits that really bring this exhibition alive. A tenderly rendered portrait of the love of his life - his estranged fiancée, Maria Bicknell painted in 1816, tells a typically Georgian story of pride and prejudice.
Constable declared his love for Maria in 1809 but her parents opposed the match. Her father, a successful Regency Court lawyer, and her grandfather, the Reverend Dr Durand Rhudde who was Rector of Bergholt, the large parish from which Constable came, both agreed that the struggling painter didn’t have enough cash to provide for the sensitive and susceptible Maria.
Maria Bicknell, 1816. © Tate, London 2009
During these difficult times, portraiture played a vital role in a courtship which saw them parted for long periods. “I am sitting before your portrait,” he wrote to Maria on July 28 1816, “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 the real pleasure that a portrait could offer.”
Next to Maria hangs a small landscape showing her grandparent’s house viewed across a Suffolk meadow beneath an impossibly romantic and yearning sky.
Opportunely for the aching Constable the sad death of his father Golding gave him the necessary income to take the plunge and marry his fiancée. The two tied the knot only a hundred yards away from where these paintings currently hang - at St Martin in the Fields. Constable’s great friend and confidant, the Reverend John Fisher whose vibrant and kindly portrait also hangs here, conducted the service.
The first phase of Constable’s marriage to Maria was his period of greatest contentment and the time he spent with her in their first house in Bloomsbury resulted in a series of blissful sketches of his wife and children.
However, as is the customary in many a Regency era tale, tragedy was not far away. Maria’s health was a constant worry and after bearing seven children she died on November 1828.
Mrs Edwards, c. 1818. © Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design Corporate Membership Fund
It was a loss that clouded the remainder of Constable’s life and his children remained his greatest love and solace. It’s interesting then to pause before the portrait of his second son, Charles Golding Constable, who at the tender age of 14 resolved to become a seaman and was entered on an East Indiaman as a midshipman – much to his father’s dismay.
With its backdrop a dark and brooding ocean the affectionate portrait of the young man was one of the last portraits Constable (now a successful landscape painter) produced. Despite being in the midst of anxiety he noted that he made a ‘good portrait’. Much like the one of Maria made in 1816 the poignancy in the painting is heightened by the prospect of absence.
Like most of the portraits here it demonstrates how Constable the landscape artist excelled at capturing likenesses and personalities. Anyone who has wandered the collections of the NPG will appreciate these fresh, direct portraits and will recognise how, displayed together like this, they are quite unlike any other British portraiture of the period.
