Constable in Love

by Martin Gayford, Fig Tree, 384pp, £20, Week Bookshop £18 (incl. p&p). "We know Constable as one of the grand masters of English painting," said Jane Stevenson in the Daily Telegraph. But for much of his life, his contemporaries knew him as the handsome son of a well-to-do Suffolk miller, "one of those unsatisfactory young men who seems born to fritter away his father’s solid achievements". For many years he struggled for acceptance in the art world: landscape was an unfashionable genre, and his paintings were regarded as "unfinished". During this time he lived in shabby north Soho, on a modest allowance which was not enough to convince the family of his sweetheart, Maria Bicknell, the granddaughter of his family vicar, to allow him to marry her. He declared eternal love for her in 1809; although she reciprocated, their relationship was doomed, as she put it, "without that necessary article, cash". Only in 1816 did her father, a wealthy lawyer who regarded the Constables as socially inferior, finally allow them to marry. "Martin Gayford's lively book tells the story of their love affair."

Gayford "has done a very good job", said Andrew Motion in the Guardian. Constable in Love is "a portrait in which affection for the subjects becomes genuinely revealing". Maria emerges as "clever and amusing", and her husband as warm and remarkably determined: as his first biographer, C R Leslie, put it: "With great appearance of docility, he was an uncontrollable man." One does wonder, though, about the wisdom of focusing the book almost entirely on the courtship and ignoring most of what went on after. "The 12 years of the Constables' marriage, Maria's eight pregnancies, the golden age of the 'six-footers' such as The Hay Wain, Maria's death from tuberculosis in 1828, are covered in a single chapter, so we end the book with a sense of disappointment."

FIRST POSTED APRIL 3, 2009