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At times, in his copious letters, one senses the veerings and fragile boastfulness of a manic-depressive. He was not a sociable painter, which at least saved him from being a society artist; he disliked painting people, though he turned out quite a few routine portraits of country-seats. In his emotional uncertainty and fear of change, he was the stuff of which rank-and-file Tories are made. He did not so much idealize stability as worship it, and as a result his entire view of rural England presents Arcadia in a new guise. One could never imagine, looking at his paintings of Dedham Vale and the River Stour, that the placid shires of the 1820s and '30s looked very different to the writer and reformer William Cobbett, that they were full of rick burners, machine breakers, hanging judges and posses of brutal yeomanry.
The most Arcadian picture in this show is Wivenhoe Park, Essex, 1816, almost the last word on Eden-as-Property. The enameled lawns and bulky cows, the relaxed zigzag of planes leading the eye toward the pink villa, the swans and fishermen riding on a serene sheet of water stitched with silver light: this is the epitome of civilized landscape. Like the best work of Jacob van Ruisdael, the 17th century Dutchman whom Constable considered a master of "natural" vision, Wivenhoe Park manages to be both real and ideal; it is a powerful (though subdued) instrument of fantasy as well as an exact rendition of General Rebow's family seat.
Constable was a painter of substance, not fantasy; but imagination rises through the substance. His earliest childhood memories, the elements of his genetic code as a painter, were all about the weight and noise and feel of things he grew up with as a well-off son of a watermill owner in Suffolk, on the River Stour. "The sound of water escaping from Mill dams . . . willows, Old rotten Banks, slimy posts, and brickwork. I love such things," he wrote to a friend. "They made me a painter (and I am grateful) . . . I had often thought of pictures of them before I had ever touched a pencil."
No wonder that, in a painter with so pronounced a taste for the specific, there was a constant argument between stereotypes and things seen. Constable loved his masters: Claude Lorrain, Ruisdael, Gaspard Poussin. Some of his most delectable paintings, such as The Cornfield, 1826, rely on the Claudean use of dark repoussoir trees framing a view of bright space at the center, and this can make them too charming to a modern eye. Constable himself remarked that The Cornfield "has certainly got a little more eyesalve than I usually condescend to give." But the great fact of nature, as Benjamin West had pointed out to Constable, was change. Shadows, vapors, clouds, the dewiness of grass in the morning, the dryness of leaves in the evening: nothing is fixed in a schema. Constable became convinced that he must overcome the stasis that convention and idealism produce in art: his project would then be, as he put it, "to arrest the more abrupt and transient appearances of the Chiaroscuro in Nature . . . to give 'to one brief moment, caught from fleeting time' a lasting and sober existence..."