Mutability: the Interaction of Past and Present in English Romanticism

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Mutability: The Interaction of Past and Present in English Romanticism

Amy Shaw

Washington Christian Academy

Olney, MD

2010 NEH Seminar for School Teachers

Interpretations of the Industrial Revolution in Britain

Why does the past matter to us now? This is a compelling question, especially for young students whose lives are often intensely focused on what is new and fashionable and who feel little connection to the outmoded technology, styles, and values of the past. At the same time, many turn to the past for reassurance or stability in a rapidly changing world, and they are not unique in doing so. In the nineteenth century, another unstable world, English Romantic artists painted what was the present for them, but they also painted the past, and these paintings are part of a profound dialogue about the interaction of past and present. Two of the artists to paint interacting views of the past and present were John Constable and J.M.W. Turner, who were born only one year apart and who became two of England’s most famous landscape painters, but whose careers, styles, and views of the world were very different. Examining a sample of their works is an excellent way to start a conversation among students about how the past and present impact each other so that they can reflect on their own interpretations of history. This paper is designed to be a reflection piece and accompaniment for the PowerPoint presentation “Mutability: The Interaction of Past and Present in English Romanticism” to help prepare a teacher to lead a seminar on the topic. It provides background information on Constable and Turner,their nineteenth century context, and on four of their paintings, Turner’s Dido Building Carthage; or the Rise of the Carthaginian Empire, and The Fighting ‘Temeraire’, tugged to her Last Berth to be broken up, 1838, and Constable’s Stonehenge and Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows.

The early nineteenth century in England was a time of considerable change. The Industrial Revolution was turning the world around, and the old and new coexisted uneasily. Many aspects of English life remained as they had been, but other aspects were new and uncomfortable. At the same time that the production and consumption of goods were changing rapidly, the nation also experienced a series of wars with France and various political reform movements. This upheaval in society was reflected in art and literature, both in how art was created and in the ideas conveyed within it;“long-established ideas concerning the visual arts were in a state of flux.” At the same time, history was developing for the first time into a recognized academic discipline (Venning 9). Many of its proponents made strong claims for the value of history; Thomas Carlyle, in his essay, “On History,” said, “Let us search more and more into the Past; let all men explore it, as the true fountain of knowledge, by whose light alone, consciously or unconsciously employed, the Present and the Future can be interpreted or guessed at (quoted byChapman 1).”David Hume added, “Would you know the sentiments, inclinations, course of life of the Greeks and Romans? Study well the temper and actions of the French and English: you cannot be much mistaken in transferring to the former most of the observations you have made in regard to the latter. Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange” (quoted byKroeber “Romantic Historicism” 150).

For Hume, Carlyle, and others, including Edward Gibbon, author of the popular Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1788), history was valuable because in explaining the past it allowed people to understand the present and perhaps even to shapethe future. It offered them an explanation, and therefore it offered them hope. In a time filled with upheavals and the unknown, this was particularly important. In this, early nineteenth century Britain and early twenty-first century United States have much in common. In their respective times, each has been the dominant imperial power, engaged in ongoing wars framed in terms of good and evil (Roe 21). Both nations experienced rapid industrial and economic change, resulting in destabilizing fluctuations in peoples’ occupations, incomes, and lifestyles. In both times, history is used to explain the present and envision the future.

In eighteenth and nineteenth century Britain, history was not just an academic preoccupation, but also an artistic one. In fact, in art, historical painting was one of the most valued genres because people believed it “made great demands upon the intellect of both the painter and viewer.” Landscape painting, on the other hand, was less respected because many people thought it required merely technical skill and was “a simple process of recording nature’s likeness” (Venning 24, 26).It demanded less of both the painter and the viewer. Not everyone agreed. Two of the most famous and influential painters of this timer were John Constable and J.M.W. Turner; both argued for the importance and inherent worth of landscape paintings by creating landscape paintings that challenged and potentially instructed the viewer as much as a historical painting might (Venning 26). Both artists were part of one of the dominant creative movements of the day, Romanticism, which grappled with many issues in a new way, including the connection between past and present. Stephen Behrdenedt said of Romantic art, “Fundamental truths and principles are revealed through their appearances within ‘everyday life’. Like the poet, the Romantic artist renders the familiar unique by presenting it in an unaccustomed way to help the viewer to ‘see’ what has been there all along, hidden in plain sight within the ordinary external universe” (62).

While the common conception is of the Romantics focusing on nature and emotion, they also examined the interaction of past and present, indeed, according to one scholar, “the primary thrust of Romantic art was neither toward apocalypse not transcendence but toward the representation of reality as a historical process” (Kroeber,Romantic Historicism 149). He added that the Romantics made use of history in order “to challenge historical hierarchies” (Romantic Historicism151).The Romantic view of history, if there was a singular view, did not focus on the “great men” on political and military history, nor was it merely a way to control the future:

Romantic historical vision is founded upon the impossibility of any definitive,that is

rationally unchanging, representation of historical phenomena. Of course the past no

longer exists; but even when the past was the present, its significant events were to a

considerable degree not perceivable and not comprehensible. For the Romantic, the

central problem is not the pastness of the past but its former presence. (Kroeber

Romantic Historicism 161)

In this philosophy, the past, like the present, is difficult to interpret, but this was one of the things that drew the Romantic artist or poet to it. Both Turner and Constable, although now famous for their paintings of contemporary England, also painted the past that had shaped it. Both commented upon the world in which they lived not only by painting what they saw, the present, but they also painted the past in order to understand the present. Their view of the past shaped how they saw the present, but their understanding of the present also colored how they interpreted the past, and this is evident in their paintings. Both of them painted the worlds they saw and imagined to make sense of the world in which they lived. However, despite living at the same time and in the same nation, “Turner and Constable scarcely see the world through the same pair of eyes and the golden radiance with which Turner characteristically fills his canvases is certainly not the same as the blue-green vibrancy we so often get from Constable” (Heffernan 134). This is true both literally and figuratively. Differing as Turner and Constable did in style and approach to art, it should come as no surprise that their views of politics and society also differed. One theme, however, united them; both painted images of the paradox of mutability. The sun that rises also sets, but it will rise again the next morning. All humans live and die in a short span of time, but something in our nature unites us with the long-dead. This theme appears in paintings by Turner and Constable of the past, Dido and Stonehenge respectively, but also in their paintings of the present, including The Fighting ‘Temeraire’ and Salisbury Cathedral.

John Constable was born in 1776 to a prosperous miller and his wife in Suffolk. Golding Constable, John Constable’s father, owned several mills and various properties in the area; later, when Constable painted Dedham Mill, he was painting his father’s land. Golding Constable originally intended his son to join him in his profession, but John Constabledecided early in his life that he wanted to be a painter and began to pursue art, despite his father’s disapproval. By the time Constable was in his mid-twenties, he was studying art full time with his father’s permission (Allhusen 2-4). Despite the slow growth of his reputation and success in the English art world, he quickly became hugely popular and influential in French art; Charles X of France awarded him a Gold Medal for The Hay Wain in 1824, but Constable, who never travelled further from his original home than Derbyshire, did not go to France for the ceremony (Allhusen 5; Smart 36). Despite his insularity, however, “in dwelling upon the scenes of his boyhood in Suffolk, and by transmuting them in recollection, over the space of many years, into the fabric of an intensely personal art woven from deeply felt memories, Constable achieved a profundity of expression which is no less telling than the vast range of Turner” (Smart 36).

Two of Constable’s paintings that are considered to be among his most profound and that reveal his ideas about past and present most clearly areSalisbury Cathedral from the Meadows and Stonehenge, both exhibited in the 1830s. Salisbury Cathedral was painted in 1831 and is “arguably the greatest of Constable’s major set-pieces … in a survey of the full cycle of his big landscapes, [it] may be seen as the climax,” and Constable himself reportedly said that it “conveyed the fullest impression of the compass of his art” (Parris 365, 367). It is an oil painting that measures 59 ¾ inches by 74 ¾ inches, and it currently hangs in the National Gallery in London. Constable painted it shortly after the death of his wife, and critics debate whether its dark skies show his grief, or whether the rainbow shows the beginning of hope and recovery (Parris 367). The foreground is bucolic and harmonious, but the background is comparatively dark and disturbing. This juxtaposition creates something of a paradox within the painting, as if the blessings of prosperity created by the establishments of the past, represented by the church, are under threat from the storm of the new ideas of the present. The art historian Michael Rosenthal analyzes this contrast:

One of [this painting’s] anomalous features is the combination of the Salisbury terrain

with a foreground which refers both to the Stour Valley and canal scenes, in particular

The Hay Wain and The Leaping Horse. Constable’s composition recalls the old format …

without invoking its iconography, for the motifs both of his pre-1822 East Anglia and of

the canal landscape he evolved after that date are under the tremendous threat represented

by the storm and lightening playing about the Cathedral itself. (Constable the Painter

234)

This anxiety is understandable, given that “the 1820s was a period of political and constitutional uncertainty … Constable revealed that for him to advocate political reform was as good as calling for revolution” (RosenthalConstable the Painter144). It is no accident that churches figure prominently in his paintings, as the buildings symbolized the institution whose preservation and protection he believed was essential to the well-being of England’s citizens (RosenthalConstable the Painter146).As Constable worked on Salisbury between 1829 and 1831, one of its working titles was “Church under a cloud”, showing the threat he believed the proposed reform would cause. He himself wrote:

What makes me dread this tremendous attack on the constitution of the country is, that

the wisest and best of the Lords are seriously and firmly objecting to it – and it goes to

give the government into the hands of the rabble and dregs of the people, and the devil’s

agents on earth – the agitators. Do you think that Duke of Wellington & the Archbishop

of Canterbury … and the best & wisest men we have – would all have opposed if, if it

was to have [done] good to the country? I do not. (quoted in Rosenthal Constable the

Painter230)

Despite Constable’s concerns about the present, not everything about Salisbury is bleak; the foreground of the painting is one of the pastoral and bucolic scenes for which he is known. One author sees the influence of Rousseau’s ideas about the condition of man in the “State of Nature” and says, “as images of man dwelling in the bosom of nature, they [Constable’s paintings] could recall the happy pastoral (pre-agricultural) stage of civilization which Rousseau believed to be the state least subject to revolutions, the best state for man” (Honour 60). This interpretation is attractive and may have some merit, but it is also problematic, given that Constable’s scenes are inherently agricultural. Around this time, after the blockades of the Napoleonic Wars, agriculture was on everyone’s minds, and more agricultural landscapes were painted in Britain. Ploughmen and farmers gained “symbolic importance”, but this was paradoxical as “apprehension of the beauty Constable perceived in landscape was possible only from a particular station, not only that from which the view was taken, but also the one which permitted that perception of its values. This viewpoint was not necessarily the ploughman’s” (Rosenthal,Constable 79). In fact, given the economic difficulties and unrest of the 1820s after the end of the Napoleonic wars, some have called Constable’s peaceful and prosperous landscapes from this era “propaganda” (Vaughan 206).

A less problematic painting, at least on the surface, is Constable’s last great watercolor, Stonehenge. As inSalisbury, a rainbow lights the sky, but unlike Salisbury, this is not an agricultural scene in which the present dominates. Constable painted Stonehenge in 1836 based on a sketch he made in 1820; it is 15¼ by 22¼ inches, and it is currently on display in the Victoria and Albert Museum.He added a hare, perhaps symbolizing the “transience of life” on a separate sheet of paper and pasted it to the painting (Allhusen 23; Parris 490). Constable added an enigmatic inscriptionon the mount “the mysterious monument of Stonehenge, standing remote on a bare and boundless heath, as much unconnected with the events of past ages as it is with the uses of the present, carries you back beyond all historical records into the obscurity of a totally unknown period”(Parris 490).

Although not agricultural, this landscape is a good example of what Constable was trying to accomplish with his painting. In this work, he highlights “the chiaroscuro of Nature”, shows the interaction between Nature and Man, and encourages the viewer both to experience and to reflect (Honour 92). The common denominator between these different aspects is Nature; “in Constable’s paintings nature becomes a principal character in what action there is; we are expected to study and reflect upon the carefully delineated details of the natural world at least as much as we are the activities of the few humans present in those settings” (Roe 66). Constable argued for the “moral feeling” of landscape, a claim usually reserved for history paintings; indeed, he said that studying and painting nature would cause a person to be “impressed with the beauty and majesty of Nature … and, thus,be led to adore the hand that has, with such lavish beneficence, scattered the principles of enjoyment and happiness throughout every department of Creation” (Vaughan 132; Honour 87). In saying this, Constable responds directly to the nineteenth-century expectation that art should “arous[e] lofty moral sentiments” by praising virtue and pointing out vice (Denvir 9). What is unusual is his use of landscapes, rather than history paintings, to accomplish this.

In Constable’s paintings, light is always important, as he believed that light brought harmony; he spoke of “the light of nature, the mother of all that is valuable in poetry, painting or anything else where an appeal to the soul is required” (Honour 92). In Stonehenge, the viewer is invited to reflect not only on the hope for the future, shown in the double rainbows, but to join the tiny figureswho contemplatethe great stones.The stones themselves dominate the landscape– this man-made monument has become part of Nature itself. In the end, the painting is something of a paradox, showing both the brevity of man’s life and yet the potential durability of his accomplishments.