Memoirs of the Life of John Constable: Composed Chiefly of His Letters

"You might say that Freud and Constable were literally close. At the age of 16, Lucian went to a rather odd and eccentric art school in East Anglia run by Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines. Morris was a distinguished painter, but one who hadn’t much recognition since the 1920s, really. Freud attended around 1939-1942. This art school was in Dedham, in the heart of Constable country, the parishes Constable had been brought up in and where he lived and painted with this landscape as his chief subject. When he died, Constable’s closest painter friend CR Leslie rather hastily put together letters and anecdotes about Constable and bound them up in a book which had mezzotint illustrations by David Lucas, copies or versions of Constable’s work. This book, which was a vanity volume to begin with – Constable didn’t have the wider public that he got later on – shows the importance of illustrations of works of art in an artist biography. They are an essential element in the same way that, if you were writing about a general or a movie star, you’d visit libraries to gather press cuttings and articles. With a painter’s life, you keep looking at the works: they tell you most. “Painting is a fundamentally straightforward practice” In Freud’s case, as indeed was the case with Constable, the work was the man. The illustrations and the book itself had to be a mixture of the personal and the objective. Never more so than with Lucian. Indeed in 2002, he and I put on an exhibition of Constable (working with the British Council and the Louvre) in the Grand Palais in Paris, which was a kind of diplomatic reintroduction of Constable to the French public. It was my idea that Lucian should help choose it. We had often said that Constable was a great portrait painter, and it would be great wouldn’t it one day to put together an exhibition of his portraits as well as his landscapes and to mix them together? We did, and it was a success. It was exciting to do, going through the works with Lucian, who even took a private plane trip from New York to Chicago to persuade the Art Institute of Chicago to lend Stoke-by-Nayland , one of the great last paintings for the show. So it was a collaboration, and I think Leslie’s Life of Constable therefore pre-reflects the relationship between me and Lucian over practical things, like which pictures to choose and how to present them. In my case, I was the one to do the actual hanging of them all, and when Lucian flew with a few friends over to Paris to look at the exhibition, he told me he congratulated himself on the installation, which of course he had nothing to do with. As an innocent eight-year-old, I got my grandfather to give me for Christmas a colour reproduction of Constable’s The Leaping Horse . Lucian, decades later, said that this painting, of a boy triumphantly astride the sort of cart horse used for hauling barges, was very much a self-image of youthful Lucian. Whereas I now recall, at the age of about eight, imagining that I was that boy jumping over the low obstacle on the towpath near Dedham. These are the ways that things just happen to link together. You can’t find connections such as these by going through archives only. Anyway, a lifetime later our exhibition Constable: le Choix de Lucian Freud was a great success in Paris largely on the grounds that Lucian’s name was up there on the banners. His American contemporary Jasper Johns, for one, envied him for getting the chance to curate, for once, and at the Grand Palais no less. While I might slightly blench at the choice of pairing Andy Warhol with the likes of Ingres, say, it is a good way in. These juxtapositions show that all painters, and of course Warhol is no exception, are part an ongoing tradition. Each generation has to reinvent the need for being an artist and to interpret the roles, just as actors reinvent the roles of a dramatic tradition. This is something which goes right back to the 16th century and to Vasari’s Lives of the Artists , the idea of the artist as a kind of standard-bearer and inheritor of past art, as well as an initiator of what’s going to be admired or not admired in years beyond our lifetimes."