synapse

for Catherine and DvP

The first thing you notice is the astonishing blue. It is a woman’s dress, with a luminous life of its own, a bright heart bursting out of a pale pink shell, made of the same colours as the blue sky, flushed pale carmine by the setting sun. Darkling, she “cannot see what flowers are at her feet, /Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs”. She has a woman’s head, but her body looks more like an exotic blue flower, a lady elf transforming from gordian to woman’s shape. Her dark curling hair might be part of a tree’s foliage.

Lady Bate-Dudley, oil on canvas c.1787. © Tate. Her husband, Sir Henry, known as the Fighting Parson, was a loyal friend and supporter of Gainsborough; he also wrote comic operas. The Bate-Dudleys inhabited a surprisingly passionate landscape in their own lives.

Viewed as late 18th century society portraiture, Gainsborough’s painting of Lady Bate-Dudley is disconcerting, being far more about abstract colour and light than the status of the sitter; as poetry of art, it perfectly evokes states of mind painted in words by Keats.

Gainsborough was a poetic painter, Keats the most painterly of poets in an age inspired by unbounded imaginative affinities. Keats’ liquid imagery was as often in danger.....
of dripping from his verse as Gainsborough’s oil-diluted colours from his palette. They were both attracted to contrasts of the tenderness of “embalmed darkness”[1] and the “silvery splendour”[2] of light; “the depths of twilight and the dews and pearls of the morning” that John Constable identified as the essence of Gainsborough's landscape.[3]

 

In one of his Hampstead lectures, Constable declared: “chiarascuro, colour, and composition, are all poetic qualities”. Keats composed To Autumn after seeing a rosy-hued stubble plain looking “warm - in the same way that some pictures look warm”. [4] Constable recognized his own joyful identification with nature in the emotions of Milton’s Adam, “his eyes opening for the first time on the wonders of the animate and inanimate world”, [5] the same fragrant, smiling landscape in Paradise Lost where the spiritual passage of waking to find “all real, as the dream” struck Keats as analogous to the “Imagination and its empyreal reflection”.[6]

A Hayfield near East Bergholt at Sunset by John Constable. Oil on paper. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

"....barrèd clouds bloom the soft-dying day/ And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue..."
Keats: Ode to Autumn

In Constable’s paintings, the transition from objective description to personal declaration of feeling is imperceptible; his ego is nowhere to be found. He has the quality which Keats called “Negative Capability”. He saw a chain of art, as Keats saw the march of Intellect, minds that “leave other in contrary directions, traverse each other in Numberless points, and [at] last greet each other at the Journeys end”.[7] Constable advised young painters to study old masters - no great painter could have existed without them - but not to imitate them, which produces mannerism. “When I sit down to make a sketch from nature, the first thing I try to do is, to forget I have ever seen a picture”.[8]

His process recalls Keats’ own training of himself in poetry, shedding imitations while still learning from great poets, all the while trying to be passive and receptive on the “voyage of conception”, the flower, not the bee, producing works of art that leave the reader or viewer in the “Luxury of twilight”, with the feeling of remembered experiences, their “own highest thoughts”.[9]

References  
[1] Keats, Ode to a Nightingale.
[2] Keats, Hyperion, Book III
[3] Constable describing Gainsborough’s landscape, C.R. Leslie, Memoirs of the Life of John Constable, Composed Chiefly of His Letters (1843), Phaidon, London, 1951, p322.
[4] Letters of John Keats, a selection edited by Robert Gittings, OUP, 1970, p291
[5] Constable, Memoirs, 329
[6] Keats, Letters, 37
[7] Letters, 66
[8] Constable, Memoirs, 279 
[9] Keats, Letters, 65, 70

PART ONE OF THE CHARACTER OF LIGHT: 

part two, part three, part four, part five

detail of Turner's Ovid Banished from Rome,1838

detail of Claude's Seaport with the Embarkation of Saint Ursula, oil on canvas, 1641. National Gallery London. Image source: WGA

"....in no other picture have I seen the evanescent character of light so well expressed." John Constable, Second Lecture at the Royal Institution, 1836

 
A chain for reference

Claude Lorrain,1600 -1682

John Milton 1608-1674; Paradise Lost published in 1667

William Hogarth 1697-1764
Thomas Gainsborough 1727 -1788

William Cowper 1731-1800

William Blake 1757-1827

Thomas Lawrence 1769 -1830

William Wordsworth 1770-1850

Coleridge and Wordworth's Lyrical Ballads published in 1798

J.M. William Turner 1775-1851

John Constable 1776-1837; painted in the open air in Hampstead from 1812; first lived there with his family in the summer of 1819

John Keats 1795-1821; lived in Hampstead 1818 -1820; great ode sequence written in 1819

Samuel Palmer 1805-1881

George Frederic Watts 1817-1904

Edward Burne-Jones 1833-1898 
Claude Monet 1840-1926
Edvard Munch 1863-1944
......