A Novelist Finds a Kindred Spirit in John Constable
Constable’s six-foot painting View on the Stour near Dedham (1822), one of six celebrated large-scale paintings of his childhood landscape, came to The Huntington in 1925. It hangs in the southwest corner room upstairs in the Huntington Art Gallery, walls painted deep red to best accentuate the work, and I visit this painting—sometimes with my daughters, sometimes alone—many times each year.
Thousands of people stand in front of their favorite Huntington works of art each year—they come from across the world to see Pinkie, The Blue Boy, and other famous paintings or sculptures. My eldest daughter used to linger in front of Joshua Reynolds’ portrait of the actress Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse, though she was also fond of the J. M. W. Turner paintings of Italy, the shivery, blinding white light he gave Venice in The Grand Canal.
Constable painted because he loved his “own place” more than any other.
But John Constable’s work saved me many times during the last five years, while I worked on a novel about a travel writer who leaves her childhood home behind, abandoning the landscape of inland Southern California’s orange groves and wild Santa Ana River, to live in Los Feliz and fly frequently to Europe. I was born in Riverside, not far from the Santa Ana, and left my river behind when I went to the University of Southern California and then graduate school. But I came back. As a novelist and professor, for 23 years I’ve lived within walking distance of my river, but last fall, I felt strange still to be writing about the same landscape. River scenes were important in my 2001 novel Highwire Moon, and I was writing again about the tangled wild grapevines and cottonwoods for Take One Candle Light a Room, my new book. My character, Fantine, can’t wait to leave behind her father’s orange grove and the river where she and her brothers used to catch crayfish. She writes about rivers in Europe—the Thames in England, the Limmat in Switzerland—and rarely visits home. But one night, her godson—an orphaned 22-year-old who wants to write about music and art, and whom she’s promised to help with visits to The Huntington and USC—gets into trouble because she refuses to let him stay with her. He takes a Constable print from her living room and goes on the run to Louisiana, to the Mississippi River, where their ancestors lived, and she has to travel to that river to find him.
But how could I continue to love my own unremarkable landscape so much, to make it my life’s work? I came to The Huntington to stand in front of Constable’s work so often because it became clear to me that his Stour River was not glorious and romanticized, but the opposite—his river and banks and people are transcendent in their everyday working life. Constable’s lack of romanticism and his ardent respect for every tree branch, every cow crossing a bridge, every boatman waiting patiently for a lock to open, made me examine those of us who create art out of those places we never leave, even if we are physically removed. Constable painted because he loved his “own place” more than any other, even after he left Suffolk for London.
John Constable was born in 1776 in East Bergholt, Suffolk, England, an area known eventually, because of his work, as “Constable Country.” The Stour River winds through the countryside, as it does through his paintings, and, rather than a rough waterway or even a scenic wild course, it is a working river; Constable’s father owned two mills, at Flatford and Dedham, and the river was punctuated by locks to make it navigable by barges—which carried grain harvested from neighboring fields and then ground in those mills to docks along the coast.
From the very beginning, when young Constable worked in the countryside around his home, he sketched the locks, the pilings and horses and barges, the mills themselves, the humble homes of farmers along the river, and the trees and banks and weeds beside the water. His father had expected John, his second son, to be a clergyman, and when that wasn’t what John wanted, to inherit the family mills. But though he worked at the mill, he travelled the Suffolk countryside sketching with a local plumber, also visiting and sketching places associated with the celebrated portrait master Thomas Gainsborough, who’d been born about 10 miles west, in Sudbury.
In 1799, he went to London, hoping to make his name and see his work exhibited at the Royal Academy, but his paintings of the working river, the wheat and cornfields, and the ordinary people and animals of Suffolk garnered little attention. Epic paintings, historical themes, and exotics were considered prestigious—not scenes of rural commerce and daily life. In 1819, Constable finished and exhibited at the Royal Academy the first of his six-foot Stour paintings, The White Horse, created from a six-foot sketch he’d painted from memory and from those sketches he’d made while still in East Bergholt, studying every detail of the land, even making sure the exact blossoms on each plant were right for the month.
The painting was a sensation—it gave an epic sense to an everyday place by its sheer size and audacity. At the Royal Academy, Constable next exhibited Stratford Mill in 1820, The Hay Wain in 1821, and in 1822, View on the Stour. In 1824, View on the Stour was exhibited at the Salon in Paris with other works, and awarded a gold medal by Charles X.
Constable died suddenly on March 31, 1837, having worked that very day on his last painting. He never left England, even when his paintings were being shown in Paris and he was at the peak of his success. He never crossed the borders to Scotland or Wales. He never made much money, for even after his Paris triumphs, his pictures sold to French dealers for an average of about 20 pounds. He had a wife who was ill for most of their marriage and who gave birth to seven children, and his financial situation was almost always dire. Yet, he found time to paint the mills, the locks, the fields, and the river Stour.
In his View on the Stour, men are poling a barge, waiting for their turn, and a girl crosses a bridge in the near distance. The footbridge is not architecturally significant or even quaintly lovely—it is a spindly contraption that ends in a steep, weedy, raw dirt bank of a rich red-brown shade. The wood pilings at the landing are strung with slimy, drying moss, and a rake lies prominently in the foreground. The white horse’s broad back is turned to us—the viewer sees the horse’s rump.
The paint is alive, in layers and broad strokes and then the smallest specks of color which might have been applied with a single hair. Swallows skim the water, tiny stones are strewn on the bank, and weedy lilies are clumped nearby. Miniscule white dots make light—the white headscarf of a small washerwoman crouched at the bank, the white on the frayed bump of old rope knotted around the piling, and on the rusty chains dangling into the water. The white dot on a boatman’s pipe is topped with an even smaller point of red.
Did I stand in front of this painting for the first time when I was only 13?
A school field trip brought me from Riverside to The Huntington. (We were called Mentally Gifted Minors back then, my group, a term that my own three daughters find hilarious, as it implied that we had no physical gifts at all.) We were let to wander, which I remember so vividly—the pond with lily pads, the Japanese Garden, and the cooled hush inside the portrait gallery where I stood before my first large paintings. I remember standing close enough to see brush strokes on canvas, the way different elements shone in the light when I moved forward and backward. I am not the kind of sentimental writer who will claim that I remember View on the Stour from that day, but I know I saw the glitter of white paint representing pearls on women’s gowns in the Gainsborough portraits, and the way the background in Lawrence’s Pinkie seemed so distant and eerily menacing to me.
I learned about art and even some about writing from the notes beside the works—diaphanous, ethereal, pastiche, pointillist. And all these years later, I made my character Fantine, the travel writer, acknowledge her debt to museums and the vocabulary they gave her.
It was Constable’s work that moved me most, in the years to come. I listened to Water Music, Handel’s iconic tribute to King George’s journey on the royal barge up the Thames; I travelled to the Mississippi many times, standing beside it in Minnesota and in Louisiana, seeing the immensity of a water highway travelled by barges. Then I walked my own Santa Ana, meandering between boulder-strewn foothills, remembering as a child when I collected acorns from the native oaks, ground them into an inedible mash, and made my younger brothers taste it. I touched the wild tobacco blossoms, yellow and tubular as macaroni. Constable made me realize I have always loved artists who make native landscapes their lifelong subjects. Marcel Pagnol wrote of his beloved hills outside Marseilles; Eudora Welty, writing in her bedroom, made vivid the landscape of small-town Mississippi; Joyce Carol Oates writes of hardscrabble rural New York; Ernest J. Gaines of southern Louisiana.
In 2007, The Huntington hosted a rare visit of Constable’s “six-footers,” and that was when I realized how he was foremost in the tradition of artists who spend their lives replicating a childhood landscape in a way that makes the place—which is often obscure—important to the world.
My own daughters have been coming to The Huntington since they were born. The middle daughter is majoring in art history/African American studies, and loves sculpture more than landscape painting. But my eldest daughter worked for a summer at The Huntington, whose art is inextricably entwined now with our lives. Last year, studying in London, she visited her favorite Constable, The Cenotaph, at the National Gallery as often as I visit View; this spring, she called from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., to report, “I visited our Constable here.” (It is Wivenhoe Park, Essex.)
In January, I walked the Santa Ana River with my dog. The recent storms had uprooted willows and bamboo and tangled the wild grapevines into snarls along the cottonwoods and oaks. The winter grass had sprouted within three days, like green needles at our feet; the fields of wild oats by summer would be golden and shaking—our untamed version of grain. I looked down the watercourse and thought of what John Constable would see—what small highlights of white and red and gold he might use to make this place seem like home.
