John Constable: Cenotaph to the Memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds

John Constable: Cenotaph to the Memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds, erected in the grounds of Coleorton Hall, Leicestershire, by the late Sir George Beaumont, 1833-6, National Gallery, London

 

Sir George Beaumont (1753-1827) was a well-known art collector and amateur painter. He had been a friend of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-92), who had died twenty years earlier, and Beaumont now honoured this friendship by erecting a stone cenotaph to Reynolds’ memory in the grounds of his estate, in the year 1812. The memorial was inscribed with verses dedicated to Reynolds, by William Wordsworth, and placed at the end of an avenue of lime trees. On either side of this avenue were placed busts of Michelangelo and Raphael, two of Reynolds’ artistic heroes. John Constable (1776-1837) the landscape painter was another of Beaumont’s friends and sometimes came to stay with him. In 1823 Constable made a pencil sketch of the memorial to Reynolds. Beaumont died in 1827, and in 1833 Constable began an oil painting of the Reynolds memorial, based on the drawing he had made ten years earlier. The long title which Constable gave to his painting indicates that he wished to honour both Reynolds and Beaumont: Cenotaph to the Memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds, erected in the grounds of Coleorton Hall, Leicestershire, by the late Sir George Beaumont. The Royal Academy exhibition of 1836 was the last to be held in Somerset House before the Academy moved to a new location, and Constable hurried to complete the painting in time for this exhibition, because he wished “to see Joshua Reynolds’ name and Sir George Beaumont’s once more in the catalogue, for the last time in the old house” (quoted in Leslie, page 254). To better understand the meaning of Constable’s picture, it is helpful to step back in time and look a little at the careers of Reynolds, Beaumont and Constable.

 Sir Joshua Reynolds: Self-portrait, c.1780, Royal Academy, London 

It can be said that Reynolds’ whole career was dedicated to preserving memories, as he was Britain’s leading portrait painter. He was also the first president of the Royal Academy, and this self-portrait was painted to hang there. Reynolds portrays himself standing next to a bust of Michelangelo and wearing the plum-coloured robes of the doctorate which had been awarded to him by Oxford University. This doctorate had been given to him not for his paintings but for his writings, the Discourses on Art, which were a series of lectures given by Reynolds to the students of the Royal Academy at the annual prize-giving, like a sort of headmaster. 

John Hoppner: Sir George Beaumont, 1803, National Gallery, London 

Sir George Beaumont, shown here in a portrait by Hoppner, was greatly influenced by these Discourses, and shared Reynolds’ belief that artists could profit from studying the works of the old masters. Although himself a portrait painter, Reynolds encouraged Beaumont’s attempts at landscape painting and gave him access to his collection of old master landscapes, which Reynolds had hung in his studio for the enjoyment of his sitters (Hudson, page 56). 

 Sebastién Bourdon: The Return of the Ark, 1659, National Gallery, London

One of the landscapes in Reynolds’ collection was The Return of the Ark by the French artist Sebastién Bourdon (1616-1671), which Beaumont admired so much that Reynolds left it to him in his will (Hudson, page 57). This landscape has all the the qualities that Reynolds and the academicians admired in a landscape. It is not just a landscape because it contains a story, in this case from the Old Testament, showing the Ark of the Covenant, which was a gold chest containing the Ten Commandments, being returned to the Israelites by the Philistines, who had stolen it from them. Reynolds cited this picture as an example of “the poetical style of landscape” (Reynolds, page 256) and Constable later wrote that “the landscapes of Sebastién Bourdon are all poetry” (quoted in Leslie, page 309). The painting can be called “poetical” because it presents a story from the past and because the landscape setting is imaginary, not copied from an actual place, although resembling the kind of scenery found near Rome. The elaborate composition is cleverly constructed, with skilful integration of figures, buildings and trees; and there are dramatic contrasts of light and shadow, including a stormy sky on the left. The style and subject matter are strongly influenced by the work of Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), the supreme painter of classical landscapes, although the colours are more subdued than in a typical Poussin.

     Sir George Beaumont: Landscape with Jacques and the Wounded Stag, c.1819, Tate Britain, London

Some of these qualities are to be found in landscapes by Sir George Beaumont himself.  One of his most important works is the Landscape with Jacques and the Wounded Stag. The picture presents an episode from Shakespeare’s play As You Like It, in which one of the characters, called Jacques, comes across a stag which has been wounded by hunters and uses this to moralise upon life’s misfortunes. In Beaumont’s painting we can see Jacques sitting on the river bank and regarding the stag on the opposite side of the river. The landscape setting is probably imaginary and there are strong contrasts of light and shadow, with light breaking through a gap in the trees to illuminate the water of the river. One of the painting’s most striking features is its overall brownish tone. Beaumont was firm in his belief that “a good picture, like a good fiddle, should be brown” (quoted in Ball, page 153). This to us rather strange notion derived from Beaumont’s study of the old masters, most of whose paintings had discoloured as the result of ageing and dirty varnish. It is also worth noting that Reynolds too tended to prefer warm tones of red and brown for his portraits.

Ramsay Reinagle: John Constable, c.1799, National Portrait Gallery, London

Beaumont’s friend John Constable, shown here in a portrait by Reinagle, is noteworthy for introducing shades of bright green into landscape painting and did not agree with Beaumont that brown should be the main colour in a picture. On one occasion, Beaumont recommended that the predominant tone of a landscape should be the colour of a Cremona violin, and Constable countered this by laying an old violin on the green grass of the lawn to demonstrate how unlike nature this would be (Leslie, page 114). But Beaumont was still not convinced. 

  Claude Lorrain: Landscape with Hagar and the Angel, 1646, National Gallery, London 

One thing which Beaumont and Constable did agree on was the beauty of the landscape paintings by Claude Lorrain (1600-1682). Claude’s paintings portray an ideal world, peopled by figures from mythology and the Bible, filled with noble trees and classical buildings, with vistas opening to the horizon, all bathed in a golden light. Beaumont’s favourite picture was Claude’s Landscape with Hagar and the Angel, which he took with him wherever he travelled, packed in a specially constructed wooden box (see National Gallery website). Constable’s friend Charles Leslie tells us that “Constable looked back on the first sight of this exquisite work as an important epoch in his life” (Leslie, page 5). 

  John Constable: Dedham Vale, 1802, Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Art historians have noticed that one of Constable’s early landscapes, a scene of Dedham Vale in his native Suffolk, reveals the influence of Claude’s Hagar and the Angel. Like Claude’s painting, it has a vertical instead of a landscape format, and the scene is framed by large trees on either side, as in the Claude. In the far distance we can see St. Mary’s Church in Dedham, which replaces the hilltop town seen in Claude’s painting.

                                               John Constable, The Hay Wain, 1821, National Gallery, London 

This borrowing from an earlier artist was untypical of Constable. Unlike Reynolds and Beaumont, Constable was less reliant on the example of the old masters. He was at first opposed to the creation of a National Gallery because he thought it would encourage artists to copy pictures rather than look at nature (Leslie, page 97). However, Constable sometimes derived profit from studying the art of the past, as here in The Hay Wain, in which the subject of a hay wagon harks back to similar scenes in old Dutch pictures. Reynolds allowed that nature, meaning the world around us, should be an artist’s main source of inspiration, as a painter who relied too much on imitating ideas from other artists would produce work that was mannered and unnatural (Reynolds, page 225). Reynolds advocated selecting the best features of nature, which involved idealising, abstracting, and generalising, with the aim of avoiding “all singular forms, local customs, particularities and details of every kind” (Reynolds, 44). Here again, Constable differed from Reynolds, in that a work like The Hay Wain is full of interesting little details such as the dog at the water’s edge and the haymakers in the distant fields. Unlike a painting by Beaumont, The Hay Wain uses bright shades of green, white and blue to evoke a Summer’s day – Constable’s original title for the picture was Landscape: Noon. The Hay Wain rivals the work of the old masters in its bold composition, its strong contrasts of light and shade, its large size, and its moral subject – the honest labour of country people. In this way Constable was trying to raise the status of landscape painting, which had hitherto been thought a lesser branch of art.

 

Although not agreeing with every aspect of Reynolds’ methods, Constable was nevertheless a great admirer of him. He had never met Reynolds in the flesh, being only sixteen when Reynolds died, but he had heard about him from Sir George Beaumont, read his Discourses, and seen many of his works. After viewing an exhibition of Reynolds’ paintings, Constable wrote that they displayed “the finest feeling of art that ever existed” (quoted in Leslie, page 41). 

John Constable: Cenotaph to the Memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds, erected in the grounds of Coleorton Hall, Leicestershire, by the late Sir George Beaumont, 1833-36, National Gallery, London

Constable’s painting of the Cenotaph to Reynolds is therefore a tribute from one great English artist to another. The painting is more than just a simple view, for it contains subtle strands of meaning. There is considerable artistic license at work, since Constable depicts the Cenotaph as much larger than it is in reality, approximately twice the size, and includes the busts of Michelangelo and Raphael, when in reality these are set much further back and would not be visible from this vantage point. The busts and the Cenotaph itself may remind us of similar sculptural features found in paintings by artists such as Claude and Poussin. The whole scene suggests a church interior, with the avenue of trees forming the nave, the busts of Michelangelo and Raphael acting as secular saints, and the Cenotaph taking the place of the high altar. But this is not to suggest that the painting has a specifically Christian meaning. Reynolds himself, although buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral, had no strong religious beliefs, but would surely have been glad to know that he lived on in the memory of his friends and admirers.

 

Constable loved the bright greens of Spring and Summer, but he has depicted the Cenotaph in late Autumn, when the leaves have turned brown and are falling from the trees. It is as though the trees are mourning the death of Reynolds, and there is also a nod to Beaumont’s belief that the main colour in a good painting should be brown.

 

Constable has introduced a stag into the picture, whose antlers echo the branches of the trees. The stag brings an element of animation to an otherwise rather static scene, and there is an implied  contrast between the living animal and the dead Reynolds. We feel that the stag’s presence is only momentary, for he will soon depart the stage, leaving the Cenotaph to its eternal quietness beneath the trees. The stag is looking towards us, the viewers. Or is it Constable himself that he is looking at? The stag also pays tribute to Beaumont because, as the art historian Anne Lyles has suggested, there is surely a reference here to Beaumont’s painting of Jacques and the Wounded Stag.

 

Constable’s picture of the Cenotaph was the last he exhibited at the Royal Academy, as he died the following year. Today it hangs in the National Gallery alongside other great works by Constable and Reynolds. Before Beaumont died, he donated his collection of old masters towards the creation of the National Gallery. Thus the memory of Beaumont, Constable and Reynolds lives on in Britain’s greatest treasure house of paintings.

Works Cited

Ball, Philip, Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour, Viking Books, 2001

Hudson, Derek, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Geoffrey Bles, 1958

Leslie, C.R., Memoirs of the Life of John Constable, Phaidon, 2^nded. 1980

Lyles, Anne 1836 "The Last Time in the Old House" (chronicle250.com)

National Gallery website The National Gallery, London

Reynolds, Joshua, Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark, Yale U P, 1997