Stanley Plumly - Elegy Landscapes: Constable and Turner and the Intimate Sublime

E LEGY
L ANDSCAPES

E LEGY
L ANDSCAPES

Constable and Turner and the Intimate Sublime

STANLEY PLUMLY

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

Independent Publishers Since 1923
NEW YORK | LONDON

For Duncan Wu

A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My endless gratitude to my editor Jill Bialosky, whose continued support makes all the difference. And equal thanks to my agent Rob McQuilkin.

And thanks to David Baker, Michael Collier, Howard Norman, and David Wyatt for their close reading of this book in manuscript.

Thanks, as well, to Drew Weitman, Pierce Brown, and Amanda Allen for their technical help.

Especial thanks to the Graduate School and the University of Maryland for their ongoing support.

Margaret Plumlys contribution goes without saying.

Having looked at a work of art, I leave the museum or gallery in which it is on display, and tentatively enter the studio in which it was made. And there I wait in hope of learning something of the story of its making.

J OHN B ERGER

P REFACE

John Constable (17761837) and Joseph Mallord William Turner (17751851) are almost exact contemporaries and are, invariably, linked in their association and rivalry within the grand tradition of English landscape painting. Both are credited, by different admirers, with a major influence on the subsequent Impressionist movement and even Modernism itself. As artists, they span the Romantic period of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats, and survive into the era of Victoria. They are each considered to be Englands supreme landscapistsindeed, they are thought to be two of the greatest landscape painters regardless of nation or generation.

Critics and fellow artists generally choose one over the other. As recently as 2002, English artist Lucian Freud curated a large selection of Constable for a Paris exhibition, commenting that in Constable there is no false feeling. For me, Constable is so much more moving than Turner because you feel for him, its truth-telling about the land rather than using the land for compositions which suited his inventiveness. For others, Turners inventiveness, his transformation of landscape into the constituents of light, his drive and search for the sublime in the least as well as the great of his sources, and his visionary range in the use of his materials set him apart. Constable is a pastoralist; Turner both an urban and hinterland pastoralist. Constable is a homebody, committed to his boyhood memory; Turner is a wanderer, committed at once to history and experiment. Constable seeks stability; Turner, survival.

Turners advantages are several. He outlives Constable by some fourteen years, and does much of his most original work in this final phase. He also starts younger and with more success than Constable; indeed, Turner becomes, at twenty-six, the youngest artist to ever achieve full academician status in the Royal Academy. Constable will have to wait until he is in his fifties before he receives full Academy admission. In addition, Turner is a traveler, first throughout Britain, then, again and again, throughout the natural wonders and cultural centers of Europe, all of which, in one way or another, figure in his art. Turners travels underscore the variety of his subject matter and method as well as the sheer volume of his total output100 finished paintings; 200 unfinished paintings; 20,000 sketches, drawings, and, most especially, watercolors: Turners watercolors are unsurpassed. Constable, on the other hand, is a purist and in important, perhaps profound ways, a provincial. He understands that his identity as an artist is directly tied to the locus of his limitations, his talent to the landscape of his heart. He develops his art over time and achieves it within an extremely circumscribed homebound agricultural space: he is into his thirties before he begins to find himself as a painter and into his forties when he paints the first of the six great Stour Valley landscapesThe White Horsethat he hopes will secure his immortality.

Turner is apolitical and otherwise agnostic; Constable is a Tory, who says of the 1831 Reform Bill, that if passed will give the government into the hands of the rabble and dregs of the people, and the devils agents on earth... which is an odd opinion coming from an idealist of the country life and country labor. Turner sells his work and becomes a wealthy if tightfisted artist, though, depending on the cause, he can be generous. Constable, who unlike Turner, comes from modest wealth, sells very little of his work, and for not enough of a price. For much of his life, Constable struggles to support his wife and seven children. Turner is famous, Constable hardly heard of; yet by the time of his best work, Constable is celebrated in France as an innovator. Turner is a popular and powerful member of the Academy; Constable is thought of, if at all, as a bit of a prig, who has too many things to say about his fellow artists. The list of differences goes on.

One important difference is that though Turner may be eccentric he is also outgoing; he moves in the world with conviction but, at the same time, with flexibility. His personal life may be private, but his public life is available. Constable, however, is a man of melancholy, who keeps his own counsel. Turner remains unmarried, while Constable needs a family as a stay against his loneliness. Turner, for all the enormous personality of his art, is, when all is said and done, a very practical man; Constables stuffiness belies his true Romantic naturehe is a poet of the fact of what is in front of him, enhanced by the fact of how he enriches it. He is a fan of Wordsworth. It is believed that Turner is partly responsible for the annual blackballing of Constables Academy admission to full status; in 1831, once his full admission to the Academy is complete, Constable uses his position on the hanging committee... to replace a picture by Turner with one of his own (Venning, 2003). Constable may admire Turner, but Turner does not return the compliment. They are not friends.

My interest in their comparative stories has different beginnings. For one, when they are talked about together it is usually for a brief moment in a brief analysis, and almost always within the context of English and European landscape art, its shared traditions and their relevance to those traditions. Only Anthony Bailey (1998, 2007) has written extensively about each of them, in separate biographies. For another, I found that the idea of the opposing thumbs of Constable and Turner is given credit for similar resultsthat is, the Impressionists. I thought this apparent contradiction to be both curious and compelling. For a third reason, I realized, after years of looking at their art on the walls of museums all over the world, that they are locked together in timethey are, together and apart, originals who change the subject of what landscape painting is. And as things developed, my chief interest became focused on the fact that ultimately, when their work moves in a different direction, they share an equal motive: the deaths of the two people whose loss changes them.

For Constable, it is the long-suffering illness and death of his wife. For Turner, it is the death of his loving and devoted father, who has served as both parents in the artists seminal years. The work, for each of these artists, as associated with and after these losses, takes on a more personal, more intimate, more subjective tone: the line fades in favor of the forms, the colors mute into the totality of the light. For Constable, it is the growing abstractionism of what has been immediate in his art: more snow as the manifestation of light, more material complexity and ambiguity, and more to look at and therefore more to see, one example of which is his two-year outdoor Hampstead studies of clouds while only a few minutes away, in their Upper Terrace home, his wife is off-and-on dying. For Turner, it begins with the sacrifice of the detail of the landscape subject altogether, as it is absorbed into the reality of the sun, as if he, the artist, is entering the projected space of the painting in order to join the art of it all itself. Turner, at the end, is completely at one with what he is seeing.