John Constable by Anthony Bailey

Author:Anthony Bailey
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448137718
Publisher: Random House

Minna must have thought the Stour valley was going to be a wild place. When the Ipswich coach crossed Stratford St Mary bridge her father had said, ‘Now we are in Suffolk,’ and she replied, ‘Oh no, this is only fields.’ She found Suffolk at first ‘very like Hampstead’, though she felt the blackberries here were better. The children were kept busy calling on friends and relatives. Young John had ridden on horseback to his uncle Golding’s newly purchased small farmhouse, opposite the windmill, ‘a sad tumble down place & very old’, that Golding called the Pie’s Nest.

Constable when relating to Maria the doings of the children didn’t neglect any local gossip he thought might interest her, such as the bilious attack suffered by Mr Travis and the wedding in Dedham of ‘Miss Bell & a Mr Spink a horse surgeon – God knows who they are – but the bells rang all day’. He would have news for Lady Dysart, too, about ‘Mr Fitzgerald who has certainly behaved ill to Golding’, by trying to get his hands on Old Hall Wood. When he was with his brother Golding, or writing to him, Constable sometimes fell into local patois or the sort of language brothers can use to one another: Bergholt was ‘Bargell’ and a bedbug-free bed was ‘free from the buggery’.7

Constable appeared to relish telling Maria of the presents Minna and he had for her; his was ‘a little pretty box for you for needles’. Perhaps he felt he had to tell her now about the gift; he didn’t dare wait. But as though to show him there was nothing to fear, Maria went to church on Sunday 11 October (‘I know you will scold’) and paid for it by spending all next day in bed. She was again seven months pregnant. He couldn’t stop getting her with child. She wrote to him that there had been a burglary in Downshire Hill (silver spoons, taken by a man dressed as a former sailor, selling pencils – he was nabbed for the theft). There had also been a delivery of coal Constable had forgotten to warn her of and – oh yes – old Mr Stothard had called, unexpectedly.

On his return, there was something to pay for the pleasures of the holiday. Constable was, or felt, broke. He was very down, as he often was when he got back home. He had sent The Cornfield to the Louvre to show at the salon, but there was no great acclaim this time, and no Arrowsmiths or Schroths came forward to buy it. Writing to Golding he said he envied him his sequestered life. Well Walk, though providing a comfortable house, was not living up to its name. When he, John and Minna got back from East Bergholt, Maria had been sure she would be ‘quite well & happy’. The birth of Lionel Bicknell Constable, their seventh child, at 4.45 p.m. on 2 January 1828 at first produced no complications. Constable exulted

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