John Constable: The Committee of Arrangement of the Exhibition

"Dell in Helmingham Park" by John Constable

"As a newly-elected Academician, John Constable was now on the Committee of Arrangement of the Exhibition, and, in a note to Mr. Lane, he says: 'I am sadly harassed, and not being able to call on you is most vexatious. I cannot go out lest my picture and my fire should go out too... I shall be overwhelmed with pictures, especially portraits, the painters of them all believing they can easily fill the shoes of Lawrence.'

In a note to me, written soon after, he says, 'I regret the entire confinement I have been in since I saw you. My picture has been, and is, plaguing me exceedingly, for it is always impossible to know what a picture really wants till it comes to the last. However, it shall go. It would amuse you to see how I am best. I have poets, earls, dukes, and even royalty at my feet. All painted canvas, of course.' His own pictures this year, 1830, were the 'Dell in Helmingham Park,' a small landscape, and 'A View of Hampstead Heath.'

While assisting in the arrangement, he found much trouble from the excessive size of some of the frames, and on remonstrating with an exhibitor on this point, who defended himself by saying that his frames were made exactly on the pattern of those of Sir Thomas Lawrence, he could not help replying, 'It is very easy to imitate Lawrence in his frames!' 

I have often observed, with surprise, how readily Constable would make alterations in his pictures by the advice of persons of very little judgment. While finishing the picture of 'The Dell,' he was one day beset with a great many suggestions from a very shallow source, and after adopting some of them he felt inclined to make a stand, which he did by saying to his adviser, 'Very true, but don't you see that I might go on and make this picture so good that it would be good for nothing?'"

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Life and Letters of John Constable, R.A." by Charles Robert Leslie.)