John Constable 1776–1837
NG 130 
The Cornfield

Judy Egerton, 2000

Extracted from:
Judy Egerton, The British Paintings (London: National Gallery Company and Yale University Press, 2000).

1826

Oil on canvas, 143 × 122 cm (56¼ × 48 in.)

Inscribed John Constable.f. London. 1826. in brown, bottom right

Provenance

Unsold in Constable’s lifetime; shortly after his death (31 March 1837), purchased from the administrators of his estate for 300 guineas by 113 subscribers, and presented by them to the National Gallery, December 1837.

Exhibited

RA 1826 (225, ‘Landscape’); BI 1827 (101, ‘Landscape; Noon’); Paris, Salon 1827–8 (219, ‘Paysage avec figures et animaux’); Birmingham Society of Arts 1829 (122, ‘Noon’); Worcester Institution 1835 (50, ‘Harvest – Noon; a Lane Scene’); Tate Gallery 1976 (242, repr.); New York 1983 (23, repr. in colour); Tate Gallery 1991 (165, repr. in colour p. 303, with detail p. 302); NG , At Home with Constable’s Cornfield, 1996 (exhibits unnumbered).

At the Tate Gallery 1960–1 .

Literature

Davies 1946, pp. 22–3; Davies 1959, pp. 9–11; Reynolds 1965, pp. 105–8; Smart and Brooks 1976, pp. 107–19; Rosenthal 1983, pp. 172–9; Reynolds 1984, pp. 167–8; Parris and Fleming‐Williams 1991, pp. 301–5.

Engraved

(1) in mezzotint by David Lucas (Shirley no. 36) as a pair to The Lock (Shirley no. 35), first published by F.G. Moon and others 2 June 1834, without a title (repr. Shirley facing p. 199); republished by F.G. Moon and others 1 July 1834, entitled LANDSCAPE.; (2) in line by C. Cousen for publication in the Art Journal, 1869, facing p. 10.

Copies

A faithful copy approximately the same size was made (? c. 1840–50) by the artist Frederick Waters Watts (1800–70), Constable’s emulator¹ (indistinctly inscribed and dated, sold Sotheby’s 13 April 1994, lot 13, repr.). At least 85 copies were made (or attempted) by students and amateurs on ‘Copying Days’ at the NG between 1857 and 1889, the years in which the Gallery’s annual reports published lists of ‘Pictures most frequently copied’.

Technical Notes

Cleaned in 1941. There are no records of treatment between the picture’s acquisition in 1837 and its cleaning in 1941, but evidence was found then of an earlier cleaning and restoration. By 1967 the canvas had become so fragile that lining was necessary; before that date there had been a double canvas, the first of which may have been an original loose lining. The picture retains its original turnover. The paint is in very good condition except for some slight abrasion in the sky. The signature is in very thin and transparent paint, not characteristic of Constable’s handling.

Discussion

This vision of a Suffolk lane in high summer was painted in Constable’s studio in London during January–March 1826. The lane which winds as if into the cornfield is a recollection of part of Fen Lane, along which Constable had often walked as a schoolboy; the route he would have taken leads from his native village of East Bergholt towards Fen Bridge over the Stour, and thence to Dedham where he attended school (but the bridge and Dedham itself are out of sight in this picture, to the right). The lane still exists, recognisably; but the scene as a whole makes no claim to be an accurate depiction of the countryside beyond it. The church tower and cluster of red‐roofed houses which provide a distant focal point beyond the bend of the river ‘never existed’, as the artist’s eldest son, Charles Constable, was later to point out.² As any other landscape painter might have done, Constable invented the village for the sake of a vista. His resolve to be a ‘natural painter’ should not be interpreted as a determination to depict every detail faithfully.

Constable himself did not use the title The Cornfield. He first exhibited the picture as ‘Landscape’, and later with varying titles (given above under Exhibited) in which the word ‘Noon’ several times figured. He was content for Lucas’s mezzotint of the subject to be published in 1834 with his original title, ‘Landscape’. The picture seems first to have been dubbed The Cornfield by the committee which organised its presentation to the National Gallery in 1837; it has been known as The Cornfield ever since. The popular title is used here to avoid confusion; it has after all some sanction in Constable’s own summary of the scene as ‘inland – cornfields – a close lane, kind of thing…’ (in a letter of 8 April 1826 to Archdeacon John Fisher,³ more fully quoted from below).

Constable appears to have begun work on the picture by mid‐January 1826, completing it by 8 April, when he ‘dispatched’ it to the Royal Academy for the forthcoming exhibition (opening to the public on 1 May). Shortage of time had forced him to work quickly. He had intended that his chief picture in the exhibition should be the large Waterloo Bridge, on which he had laboured during 1825; but progress with it was fitful. ‘My Waterloo like a blister begins to stick closer & closer – & to disturb my nights’, he confided to Fisher on 19 November 1825; by mid‐January he reported ‘My large picture is at a stand.’⁴ For this he blamed ‘the ruinous state of my finances’, which compelled him to lay Waterloo Bridge aside in order to complete various commissions; but it seems that inspiration for it had failed. Working at Brighton during the last days of December and early January 1826, Constable had little trouble in painting the small Mill at Gillingham, in Dorsetshire, a commission which provided one good subject to send to the forthcoming Royal Academy exhibition;⁵ but his need of a large picture to accompany it now became urgent.

Though not one of his ‘six‐footers’, The Cornfield was conceived on a sufficiently large scale to embody (in Graham Reynolds’s phrase) Constable’s ‘determination to bid for attention at the Academy through monumental renderings of the Stour scenes which had first suggested pictures to him as a child’.⁶ It was conjured up largely from material already in Constable’s studio.

The motif of a wooded lane leading to a more sunlit prospect had often recurred in Constable's work since his Woodland Scene of 1801,⁷ with its echoes from both Ruisdael and Gainsborough. Dedham Vale from the Coombs,⁸ the following year, was to open up the prospect beyond the lane in a way which anticipates The Cornfield. What is probably Constable’s first conception of The Cornfield is expressed in a very free oil sketch now in Indianapolis (fig. 2).⁹ In this, most of the elements of the finished picture are present, but spontaneously dashed in rather than defined. The basic similarity of composition in the sketch and in the finished picture has previously prompted suspicion that the Indianapolis sketch might be a later artist's impression of Constable’s finished [page 53]picture.¹⁰ Its authenticity was established in 1988 by Charles Rhyne, who suggested that that this may be the work described in Constable’s sale, 16 May 1838 (part of lot 14), as 'The Corn Field; a study from nature, for the picture in the National Gallery’.¹¹ Both Rhyne and Reynolds date this sketch to 1816 (a year in which Constable made several visits to Suffolk), noting its stylistic resemblance to the oil sketch for Flatford Mill, exhibited in 1817.¹²

The oil study at present in Birmingham (fig. 1)¹³ was almost certainly made in the studio shortly before Constable began work on the finished picture. Omitting all staffage, this study was evidently made to work out how the lie of the land (very broadly indicated in the Indianapolis sketch) is to be credibly represented. The need for ‘mapping’ was greater than may at first sight appear in the finished picture, since the lane, itself rutted and uneven, bends (and branches off to the right), the bank on the left (where the corn stands tall) is much higher than on the right, the cornfield slopes down towards the river and the more recent idea of a distant village (not present in the Indianapolis sketch) has to be worked in. The finished picture closely follows the landscape contours of the Birmingham study, and echoes most of the falls of light worked out in it. The most notable difference in the finished picture is that a dying tree is substituted for a vigorous one on the left. Minor differences include some reduction in the mass of the trees on the left, and bringing the glimpse of a red‐roofed village on the horizon into more clarity on a site near the river‐bend. In their catalogue of the 1991 Constable exhibition, Parris and Fleming‐Williams prefer a different dating; they suggest that the Birmingham study is one of a group of studies from nature which Constable is known to have made in Suffolk in 1817, and is unlikely to have been made with The Cornfield specifically in mind;¹⁴ and they see the Indianapolis sketch as the preliminary sketch made in the studio, shortly before Constable began work on the big picture.¹⁵ To this compiler, Reynolds’s reasoning is more convincing.

Some of the details were taken from other early studies, probably mostly made on the spot. The boy drinking is adapted from an oil sketch made some fifteen years earlier (fig. 3), probably also made in Fen Lane, though further along it,¹⁶ Constable sometimes referred to his finished picture as ‘the drinking boy’.¹⁷ Reynolds suggests that the motif was ‘an important symbol for Constable … possibly recalling similar occasions when he slaked his own thirst when he was walking to school’.¹⁸ The pool from which the boy drinks is presumably fed by an underground spring, of the sort which abound along the Stour; the gently rotting wooden barrier [page 54]which protects the pool from encroaching water plants stands here for all the ‘slimy posts’ and ‘old timber props … &c &c ’ in which Constable delighted.¹⁹

On 8 April 1826 Constable was able to report to Fisher:I have dispatched a large landscape to the Academy – upright, the size of my Lock – but a subject of a very different nature inland – cornfields – a close lane, kind of thing – but it is not neglected in any part. The trees are more than usually studied and the extremities well defined – as well as their species – they are shaken by a pleasant and healthfull breeze – ‘at noon’ – ‘while now a fresher gale, sweeping with shadowy gust the feilds of corn &c , &c .' I am not without my anxieties – but they are not such as I have too often really deserved – I have not neglected my work or been sparing of my pains… My picture occupied me wholly – I could think of and speak to no one. I was like a friend of mine in the battle of Waterloo – he said he dared not turn his head to the right or left – but always kept it straight forward – thinking of himself alone.He added: ‘I do hope to sell this present picture – as it has certainly got a little more eye‐salve than I usually condescend to give to them.’²⁰

‘More eye‐salve’ than usual presumably means more charm, or more picturesque details. He did not stint on these. Some of the details are adapted from his earlier works. The donkey cropping the hedgerow on the left in The Cornfield is an echo from Dedham Vale: Morning, exhibited in 1811;²¹ but for The Cornfield he made a fresh oil study of the donkey, in the same attitude but with a foal beside her.²² The decision to include donkeys may have been prompted by the fact that Constable had also turned back to a very early oil painting, perhaps the picture exhibited in 1802 as Edge of a Wood (fig. 4),²³ but unsold, which included (as well as a donkey) a tree which he needed for the extreme left of The Cornfield. He retained its shape and most of its branches, but converted a living, pollarded tree into one which is half‐dying, its upper branches denuded: symbolism has been read into this, but perhaps Constable at that point in his picture chiefly needed to gain emptier space by losing the density of summer foliage. The plough conspicuously placed near the gateposts to the cornfield is taken almost exactly from a finely observed oil sketch inscribed 2d Novr. 1814; left in the open outside the still unharvested cornfield, its presence there is premature. John Creasey suggests that Constable may have included it as a reminder (to the public) that ploughing follows harvest; but perhaps it was simply a detail which Constable considered too good to waste.²⁴ The black and white sheepdog (? of Border Collie breeding)²⁵ is similar to the dog in The Hay Wain of 1821 (NG 1207, pp. 42‐9); Reynolds notes that its type recurs in The Lock of 1826 and Hadleigh Castle of 1829.²⁶ Reynolds²⁷ suggests that Constable may have derived the idea of sheep being driven along the lane from Gaspard Dughet’s Landscape in the Roman Campagna (now NG 68), which David Cox RWS certainly knew, and which Constable could have seen when it was exhibited at the British Institution in 1822 (Reynolds adds, with characteristic sanity, ‘though so obvious a motif need not be a reminiscence’).²⁸

Altogether, Constable loaded The Cornfield with picturesque detail: the ‘drinking boy’, two donkeys, fifteen sheep, a sheepdog whose concentration appears to have been distracted by the sight (or sound) of a wood‐pigeon fluttering from the trees on the left, a church in a red‐roofed village, a river meandering through level green meadows and more touches of poppy‐red than in any other of his pictures. If there is, as Reynolds noted in 1965, ‘a great reserve of emotion’ about this image of the lane along which Constable had daily walked to school,²⁹ there is also, on the surface, the hope which Constable had frankly expressed to Fisher: ‘I do hope to sell this present picture…’³⁰

Much has been made of a letter written to Constable on 1 March 1824 by his botanist friend Henry Phillips who, having seen the picture at a fairly early stage (presumably in February), wrote:I think it is July in your green lane. At this season all the tall grasses are in flower, bogrush, bullrush, teasel. The white bindweed now hangs its flowers over the branches of the hedge: the wild carrot and hemlock flower in banks of hedges, cow parsley, water plantain &c ; the heath hills are purple at this season: the rose‐coloured persicaria in wet ditches is now very pretty: the catch‐fly graces the hedgerow, as also the ragged robin; bramble is now in flower, poppy, mallow, thistle, hop, &c .³¹This letter is quoted in full both by Reynolds³² and by Parris and Fleming‐Williams.³³ The latter authors state that Constable ‘had plainly sought’ help from Phillips over ‘the correct plants to put in the foreground for the time of year he was depicting’. If so, he made little or no use of Phillips’s list, which is evidently from an all‐England reference book translated into Gilbert White prose. However appropriate Constable’s ‘wet ditch’ may have been as the natural habitat of the ‘rose‐coloured persicaria’,³⁴ he had no time to mug it up. Only Constable’s standard summer plants, butterbur (in the wet patches in the foreground), cow parsley, bramble, and poppy (ubiquitously, in little touches of red in the corn on the left, under the group of elms and more improbably in the shade of the trees on the right) can certainly be identified in The Cornfield.³⁵ Constable made two studies of butterbur about this time,³⁶ probably using them for A Mill at Gillingham³⁷ as well as for The Cornfield. With his trees he was more confident, reporting to Fisher that in this picture they were ‘well‐defined as to species’. On the left is a dying (not dead) oak, then three elms, with more oaks and perhaps a silver birch in the wood on the right; the ‘brushwood sheaf/ Round the elm tree bole’³⁸ (at which the donkeys nibble) is particularly well observed.

When exhibiting the picture for the second time, at the British Institution in 1827, Constable gave it the title ‘Landscape; Noon’, accompanied by a few lines from ‘Summer’, from Thomson’s The Seasons³⁹ (they had been in his mind [page 55]while he was working on the picture: he had quoted from them, not accurately, when writing to Fisher in April 1826, see p. 54). In his quotation for the 1827 exhibition catalogue, the italics are his own: ‘A fresher gale/ Begins to wave the woods and stir the stream/ Sweeping with shadowy gust the fields of corn.’

It has been pointed out that Thomson’s lines describe the approach of ‘sober Evening’,⁴⁰ while Constable himself specifies ‘noon’: and the light breeze seemingly playing through the trees in his lane hardly echoes Thomson’s fresher gale, gustily sweeping the fields of corn. But quotation has never yet been subject to precise rules. What Constable chiefly responded to in Thomson’s lines was the idea of fresher air over fields of corn.

Probably Constable’s scene represent represents high summer, perhaps mid‐ to late August, not long before harvesting. The cornfield itself is painted with masterly economy: a few vertical strokes of the brush at the field’s edge are enough to inform us that the crop is corn (probably wheat), and that it has grown tall: then the brush broadens into a pale golden, slightly undulating sweep, and thereby creates an entirely convincing field (though not one swept by a shadowy gust). Corn growing at the very edge of a field on the left (fig. 5) informs us more exactly of the near‐ripeness of the season. There is no point in the plough’s presence outside the cornfield (except as a picturesque eye‐stopper) unless harvesting is imminent and it is soon to be put to use ploughing through the stubble.

There has been much discussion over the degree to which Constable depicts a ‘real’ or ‘illusory’ countryside in The Cornfield.⁴¹ Arguments over whether the sheep will wander into the cornfield while the boy slakes his thirst and the dog’s attention is momentarily distracted,⁴² over why the dead tree has not been cut down, or why the gate is off its hinges, are by no means uninteresting, but lose sight of Constable’s larger source of inspiration. A ‘fresher gale’ must take us back to Constable’s long love of Claude, whose general influence permeates this scene.

A compositional debt to Claude’s Landscape with Hagar and the Angel, of which Constable painted a copy in the spring of 1800 (the Hagar was then in Sir George Beaumont’s collection, and is now NG 61) has long been recognised, both in The Cornfield of 1826 and in the much earlier Dedham Vale of 1802, which in many ways anticipates it.⁴³ In the autumn of 1823 Constable spent six weeks at Coleorton as the Beaumonts’ guest. Beaumont had already announced that he was to present most of his collection to the newly founded National Gallery: aware that ‘Sir G. will not possess these things for longer than a room is ready in the Museum to receive them’,⁴⁴ Constable concentrated his attention at Coleorton on Beaumont’s Claudes.⁴⁵ He painted studious copies of Landscape with the Death of Procris (now NG 55)⁴⁶ and of Landscape with Goatherd and Goats (now NG 58), taking time over them – ‘a sketch (of a picture) will not serve more than one state of mind & will not serve to drink at again and again.’⁴⁷ Constable not only copied Claude; he also ‘slept with one of the Claudes every night’, Beaumont indulging his guest to the point of letting him unhook a Claude from the breakfast room to hang in his bedroom. ‘The Claudes are all I can think about while here’, he wrote to his long‐suffering Maria.⁴⁸

The Landscape with Goatherd and Goats affected him powerfully. He wrote that ‘It contains almost all that I wish to do in landscape’, and set himself to make ‘a nice copy from it to be usefull to me as long as I live’.⁴⁹ He described it as ‘a noon day scene – which “warms and cheers but which does not inflame or irritate" – Mr. Price. [It] diffuses a life & breezy freshness into [page 56]the recess of trees which make it enchanting.’⁵⁰ Constable’s ‘nice copy’ is likely to have helped to inspire him to infuse a mood of ‘noon day’ and ‘breezy freshness’ into The Cornfield. While Constable’s ‘drinking boy’ is outwardly a less idyllic figure than Claude’s piping shepherd, each is proper to the landscape he inhabits, and each (in a sense) momentarily possesses it. Constable often referred to Claude in his lectures on the history of landscape painting, in one of them remarking that ‘In Claude’s landscape all is lovely – all amiable – all is amenity and repose; the calm sunshine of the heart.’⁵¹ This, perhaps, was the mood which he tried to capture in The Cornfield.

Reviewers of the exhibition mostly admired The Cornfield. The Times reviewer, having devoted most of his column to portraits and history paintings, added: ‘The best landscapes (beyond all comparison) in the exhibition are from the pencil of Mr Constable. One of them, No. 225 (The Cornfield) is singularly beautiful, and not inferior to one of Hobbima’s most admired works.’⁵² The most ardent praise was given by The Examiner’s reviewer, R.H. (Robert Hunt, brother of Leigh Hunt), who stressed that Constablehas been faithful to his first love, Nature, from the commencement of his career… [No.] 225, Landscape, grows into higher admiration the more it is looked at, not only for the pure pastoral it contains, – the flock of sheep, the shepherd boy stretched on the ground to drink, the ploughed corn‐field, the village church &c. but for its sapphire sky and silver clouds, its emerald trees and golden grain, its glittering reflexes of sun‐light among the vegetation; in fine, its clear, healthful and true complexion, neither pale, nor flushed, nor artificial.⁵³When The Cornfield was exhibited at Worcester in 1835, Berrow’s Worcester Journal also gave it high praise, but considered that ‘the sky is rather too cold and stormy to suit the idea of heat, which the artist has excited by the colouring and action of the scene’.⁵⁴

The picture failed to sell, either at the Royal Academy or in any of the four other exhibitions to which Constable later sent it: the British Institution exhibition in January 1827, the Paris Salon later that year, the exhibition arranged by the Birmingham Society of Arts in 1829 or that of the Worcester Institution in 1835.

Soon after Constable’s death (on 31 March 1837), his Hampstead friend William Purton discussed with C.R. Leslie RA the idea of purchasing a painting from Constable’s studio to present to the National Gallery, inviting subscriptions from a wide circle of Constable’s friends and admirers. Such ideas do not always get off the ground; this one triumphantly (and quickly) did. A committee chaired by the 84‐year‐old Sir William Beechey RA met on 6 June 1837 in Constable’s studio;⁵⁵ together they selected The Cornfield, as likelier to appeal ‘to the general taste’ than the more exuberantly mannered Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows (see p. 39, fig. 2). The administrators of Constable’s estate agreed to sell the picture for 300 guineas (£315), a figure probably established by Robert Vernon’s purchase of The Valley Farm off Constable’s easel two years earlier. An account was opened at Drummonds Bank; circulars flowed out; subscriptions (ranging from one to ten guineas) flowed in, from 113 men and women, their names later listed in a printed roll‐call.⁵⁶ Many had known Constable at different periods of his life; others (not readily identifiable) perhaps knew Constable chiefly through the paintings he exhibited, the English Landscape Scenery mezzotints he published (at a loss) or the lectures he had given on landscape in Hampstead, Worcester and at the Royal Institution.⁵⁷

Eight months after Constable’s death, the picture he had repeatedly failed to sell fulfilled his admirers’ determination that ‘one of his Pictures should be permanently accessible to the Public’. On 1 December 1837, Sir William Beechey on behalf of the 113 subscribers formally offered The Cornfield to the Trustees of the National Gallery, who accepted it ‘gratefully … on the part of the public’. It was the first picture by Constable to enter the national collection.

Notes