Dedham Vale, 1802 and 1828
The above landscape is Dedham Vale, painted by John Constable in 1802. John Walker writes:
In 1802, at the age of twenty-six, Constable faced two decisions that were to determine his future. He had been offered the job of drawing master at the military college at Great Marlow. Acceptance meant security. He chose instead the hazardous profession of an independent artist. This rejection of a safe position was a turning point in his life. “Had I accepted the situation offered”, he wrote John Dunthorne, it would have been death blow to all my prospects of perfection in the Art I love.”
…At the same time he reached a second decision of equal importance. He determined to “return to Bergholt where I shall make some laborious studies from nature…there is room enough,” he told his friend, “for a natural painture [sic].” (1)
Dedham Vale is one of the first of these “laborious studies from nature”. Although this painting may look conventional to us now, it was revolutionary in the context of British landscape painting at the time. It had no classical, Biblical, or patriotic central focus. Rather, the painting pays homage to the childhood backyard of Constable himself - “the sound of water escaping from mill dams…willows…I love such things…” (2) - rendered as vividly and true to nature as possible. Instead of the romance of a classical or Old Testament scene, or the opulence of a great estate and house, we have the simple ‘now aliveness’ of the Suffolk countryside.
Despite this independence and, indeed, ‘modernity’ (the present modern world, not the classical or biblical past, is the appropriate subject of art), Constable did have a more ‘traditional’ model or ancestor in mind - Claude Lorrain’s Landscape: Hagar and Angel (1646), with its billowing, framing, foreground trees.
Twenty-six years later, in 1828, Constable would paint the same Dedham landscape…
…but luminously this time!
The greatness of the painting lies in Constable’s masterly handling of broken light, the “chiaroscuro of nature,” and the beautiful rendering of a showery day. The landscape seems to glitter in the sunshine. Huge, billowy clouds adorn one of the loveliest skies in art. The eye travels across fields, some brightly illumined, some heavily shrouded, past Dedham and its church and on to Harwich in the distance. The great sweep of space, so magnificently depicted, is exhilarating. Constable had at last given his definitive treatment to this view…a prospect which had enthralled him all his life. (3)
What happened in those twenty-six years, professionally, biographically, and, indeed, spiritually, for Constable to paint such a different Dedham Vale, with so much more colour, light, detail, and splendour?
What if the developmental journey of the artist is similar to the developmental journey of faith?
What if the Vale that Constable is perceiving and painting - the countryside in which he is in love with - is actually the body of God, the vast and intimate plenitude of Being? What if the painting itself represents the quality of Constable’s consciousness, his dynamic, evolving, personal capacity to receive and transmit this ultimate reality?
It’s not just the artist who has changed in those twenty-six years. Dedham Vale (and what it might symbolize for us here) has changed, too. The river has been bridged. More houses have been built. Dedham, in the distance, is larger.
The trees have swollen and hardened their trunks. A woman nurses her baby…
References
(1) John Walker, John Constable (1991), p.48.
(2) John Constable quoted in Ronald Parkinson, John Constable: The Man and His Art (1998), p.15.
(3) Walker, John Constable, p. 100.
