[while washing the dishes]
I thought about the painter who painted his father's vegetable garden
In 1815, the English painter John Constable made a pair of paintings in oil on canvas that were for his own collection. By “his own collection”, I mean they must have been for his own house, hung on his walls. When I first encountered these paintings—and I’ll get to the paintings themselves in a moment—it struck me that the painter had made them for his own house. This seemed of a primary importance, or, it filled in the contours of an idea that had been moving in my mind for a while. I’m keeping the paintings back from you for now because I want to think first about the fact that Constable made these paintings for himself. Art can be for this: for making our own places beautiful, for remembering, and for trying to understand the world. When I look at Constable’s paintings, made for himself, I see art that is outward-directed, i.e. attentive to the world, and also inward-aiming, i.e. not made to be sold but for something else (the ‘something else’ of our own lives).
This is often the originating impulse in making texts, images, objects for me: to make something that will render my own place more pleasing, interesting, comfortable, complex, or beautiful, and that will help me understand my surroundings, my life, a difficult idea, or another piece of art. (This has been especially true in times when I haven’t had much money. The internet confronts me continuously with things to want. But art lets me choose: what do you want enough to make it? And then what? I include here what Virginia Woolf called the “little arts of talk, of dress, of cookery”—I have to think that making clothing must fall under ‘dress’ as an analogue to ‘cookery’.) Form, pattern, composition, movement, color, duration, sequence are ways of working out and understanding beauty, power, pain, loss, wonder, belonging—and also of understanding form, pattern, composition, movement, color, duration, sequence themselves.
So here are the paintings.
Constable painted these two views of his father Golding Constable’s gardens—flowers and food—in 1815. The paintings show the gardens in their surroundings in the Suffolk village of East Bergholt. From the reproductions I downloaded, I can’t make out exactly what is growing there, but that doesn’t seem to be the aim of these paintings in any case. They are not botanical pictures or agricultural advertisements; they do not catalogue a precise range of fruit and flowers. They are doing something else. In the painting of the vegetable garden, someone in white shirt stands hoeing or raking, their back to us, in the lower right. Around the gardens are the fields, copses, villages; in the distance, in the kitchen garden painting, I think I can make out the cross-arms of a windmill. (Constable’s father was a miller.) The painting of the flower garden shows with care a brick wall, a timber fence, the lawn’s precise edging (someone has trimmed it away with a spade). Above the gardens, in both paintings, Constable has put in the English summer skies, full of the large clouds that appear in other of his paintings. The gardens are in shade. Is this afternoon? Is the day racing away from the painter as he paints?
A year or so before he painted these pictures of his father’s gardens, Constable painted another image of the Essex landscape. This painting, The Stour Valley and Dedham Village (1814, collection of the Boston MFA) was commissioned by Thomas Fitzhugh on behalf of his bride Philadelphia Godfrey “so that his wife could be reminded in London of a familiar scene from her childhood” (Reynolds, 60). The painting can keep you company. It can acknowledge what is lost when we leave those places that have formed us. It can remind us of the ones who go on living there, and remind us of the dead who sleep in narrow beds among their own late beloved ones.
Constable grew up in a house his father built, surrounded by these gardens. He must have spent time working in them as a boy and young man. His letters, sketchbooks, and paintings of the village he grew up in testify to his affection for this place. But beginning at the turn of the 19th century (when he would have been about 24), he left East Bergholt and lived in London part of the year as he tried to become a recognized painter. He returned to East Bergholt in part to work—to learn to see by sketching and painting. In 1815, the year he painted these pictures, he was in East Bergholt in May and again from July through December, when his father was seriously ill (Reynolds, 180). His mother had collapsed while working in the garden in spring 1815, and his father would die in May of 1816. It must have been, by dates given to the paintings, during the months just after his mother’s death that Constable painted these two pictures.
After his father’s death, Constable would marry Maria Bicknell and from then on live with her and their children in London, in Hampstead, in Brighton. Reynolds writes that for “many years [Constable’s] visits to East Bergholt were confined to hasty journeys on business matters” (15). As far as I can tell he never returned to live in the Suffolk-Essex border country along the Stour, for which his pictures show so much attention. Growing up, the places we live we often take for granted, a steady and even uninteresting background to the longings and wonderings, flashes of event that draw our daily attention. This is just home. These are just the tomatoes planted by the garage. This is just my mother, my father. At some point we make the decision to leave, whether to points near or far, and on that day leaving may seem like an inconsequential choice. And yet decades pass sometimes before we can return to these places, and sometimes we never can. The painter’s habit of looking is transformative—not of the place but of looking itself. It changes what the seeing means: from ordinary to precious, from background to foreground, from support for meaning to meaningful in itself.
I imagine Constable in his father’s gardens (his mother’s gardens, too, I think they must have been), painting them. I imagine him making these paintings in order to be there in the gardens, in order to bear and proceed under the weight of bewildering grief, or the banality and dullness of waiting for a death. The curiosity that is enlivened in a person by the act of looking and trying to make a representation is its own reward, and it also can move the mind away from difficult preoccupations that thinking will not change. Making the work in order to learn how to look is part of making any work, but maybe especially when one is looking at something so familiar that has been rendered especially precious by the reminder of loss. When I think of Constable making these paintings, I am placed in the gardens by the panorama the two canvases form. But I am also faced with the kinds of questions that we spend our lives working out: what is death? What is a family? Who are these people called parents? Why must we leave, and how can we bear it? Will this place remain? Why does time keep moving and how is it that it can feel both linear and circular at once? Constable made these at a moment when the death and illness of his parents would have made the transience of all things appear in sharp relief. I read in them the awareness of that transience. The paintings become a way to hold onto a place he loved, even while he lived elsewhere. He kept them with him all his life (Kennedy, np).
The ordinary places of our ordinary lives: the vegetable gardens, flower gardens, neighborhoods, houses, streets, schools. The bedrooms and living rooms and kitchens of our ordinary childhoods; their decorations and their furniture. These precious signifiers of what cannot be held. When Constable paints the two pictures of his father’s gardens and keeps the paintings to hang on his own walls are they a kind of memorial picture? Maybe so. I think they are also simply pictures of what was beautiful to him, privately beautiful because of what they betokened as well as beautiful in the shared way that artworks are (color, composition, etc.). This is, finally, what most draws me to these paintings: that they were made for the painter’s own life, from the materials of his living and looking. They remind me that art is and can be for this: for understanding and reckoning with the world, for recording it, and for hanging on our own walls.
Works cited
Constable, John. Golding Constable's Flower Garden, 1815. Oil on canvas, 33.1x50.7 cm. In the collection of the Ipswich Borough Council Museums and Galleries. Image in the public domain, retrieved via Wikimedia Commons.
Constable, John. Golding Constable's Kitchen Garden, 1815. Oil on canvas, 33x50.8 cm. In the collection of the Ipswich Borough Council Museums and Galleries. Image in the public domain, retrieved via Wikimedia Commons.
Constable, John. The Stour Valley and Dedham Village, 1814. Oil on canvas, 55.3x78.1 cm. In the collection of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
Kennedy, Maev. “Garden state: Constable's paintings of home reveal his emotional side”. Guardian, 16 June 2015, 18:04 BST. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/jun/16/constables-gardens-review-john-constable-paintings-christchurch-mansion-ipswich. Accessed 20 June 2023.
Reynolds, Graham. Constable’s England. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Fine Art, 1983.
This is a beautiful meditation. In it, I feel my own questions about where I belong but also about where my writing belongs and to whom. And I struggle with how to make my work meaningful for others, but I also realize that if it’s not for me first, it doesn’t work.