Hurry up, Hallowe’en, Part 3
Werewolves! Seen ‘em with my own eyes!
“Storm Clouds over Hampstead”
When last we saw John Constable, he was sitting nervously in the waiting room at Sotheby’s this past July, next to JMW Turner, both of them fingering paintings of theirs that were up for bids. Turner had every reason to lack confidence in his unsaleable watercolour, as explained in this post, but it sold for a very handsome price.
No one wanted Constable’s cloud study, though — at least not for the envisioned haul of £300,000 to £500,000.
A shame: His views of clouds, though never intended for exhibition, are pensive yet full of emotion, fine examples of his readiness to experiment in sketches. Sotheby’s had hopefully compared “this recently discovered work” to another it auctioned in 1991, which sold for £264,000.
Art accumulator Barbara Piasecka Johnson, married to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, liked “Storm Clouds over Hampstead” a great deal, but now she’d joined her husband in death and Constable’s painting, done about 1822, was an orphan.
The mood following its failure to find a new home just as nice must have been as dark as the skies depicted, which in their day had scowled at the imminence of another awful death, that of Constable’s wife Maria.
The Constables’ Camden Town home was on Well Walk, which you can see here thrusting onto Hampstead Heath.
Maria lay in bed at their house in Hampstead, gasping for air, so John went out for a walk on the broad heath and collected a pair of lungfuls of it for her. His thoughts at times must have harked back to breezy East Bergholt in Suffolk, almost 100 kilometres to the northeast, where he was born and raised in the aroma of ground corn.
Young John helped out at his father’s mill and watched the River Stour, forming the frontier against Essex, idle along and past the Lotts’ thatch-capped house next door. He’d paint both places and make them famous one day, immortalising Willy Lott’s Cottage, as it’s now known, in “The Hay Wain”, a picture the Britons came to love after it inspired the French, notably Géricault and Delacroix.
Still besotted of Constable’s brush, Flatford Mill and Lott’s home. The Stour runs deeper now thanks to land subsidence.
“The Hay Wain”
Constable always sold more paintings in France than England but declined to “do a tour”. “I would rather be a poor man here than a rich man abroad,” he declared.
The sky was the same, no matter the place. His father had taught him to watch the clouds for signs of shifts in the weather that would help or hinder the mill’s work. All his life Constable was a keen amateur meteorologist. In the end he was able to say, “I have done a great deal of skying.”
Maria Constable’s long suffering ended in November 1828 and the sky grew darker, as did her husband’s wardrobe of grief as he set to the task of raising seven children alone. When he died on March 31 seven years later, “apparently from indigestion”, he was buried next to Maria outside St John-at-Hampstead. Peter Cook and Kay Kendall are among their soilmates.
Evidently the much busier Palma Giovane (1548?-1628) is another suspect, but this “Ultima Cena” was being auctioned off in Peranda’s name in Milan recently, for around €35,000.
