In writing to his friend John Fisher in 1823, John Constable relayed the fact that he would never see Italy, yet he said, “I was born to paint a happier land, my own dear England.”¹ His resolve to portray the English countryside extended to printmaking, and he published prints of his landscape subjects from 1829 until his death in 1837.² Constable was taught to etch by his early mentor, J. T. Smith, and he made a handful of etchings during his career.³ However, Constable required help for his major printmaking output, a portfolio of twenty-two mezzotints engraved, under his supervision, by the younger David Lucas and titled Various Subjects of Landscape, Characteristic of English Scenery from Pictures Painted by John Constable, R.A., known as English Landscape. Constable’s strategy was to create a series of prints after his paintings, a plan perhaps started by a letter from Archdeacon Fisher in 1822 recommending that Constable have some paintings lithographed. In 1824 Fisher encouraged the artist to have certain drawings of boats made into mezzotints in England for publication by the Anglo-French dealer John Arrowsmith in Paris, for which Samuel William Reynolds (1773–1835) was to have been the responsible engraver.⁴ That same year, Constable wrote a letter to Fisher that he was “working up drawings from the ‘Brighton Sketch Book’ for the engravers,” but it did not come to fruition. Instead, he commissioned Reynolds to make a large engraving, after his painting The Lock, that was never completed.⁵ David Lucas had been apprenticed to Reynolds. In Constable’s letter to Fisher, he stated his admiration for Lucas as a printmaker: “His great urbanity and integrity are only equaled by his skill as an engraver, and the scenes now transmitted by his hand are such as I have ever preferred.”⁶

Constable conceived English Landscape in the months after the death of his wife, Maria, in November 1828 and his overdue election to the Royal Academy of Arts in February 1829. Constable translated imagery into black and white for this portfolio of twenty-two mezzotints after large oil paintings and small oil sketches as well as drawings and watercolors from various stages of his artistic career. He was well aware of the fame and public recognition that could be achieved from this endeavor. In an 1825 letter to his friend John Fisher, he wrote, “They cannot engrave my color or evanescence, but they can the chiaro oscuro & the details & the taste and with it most of my sentiment.”⁷ In their collaboration, Lucas submitted proofs to Constable, who then obsessively altered and refined the printed images with touches of gray and white wash. The final effect of the mezzotints also depended on the inking and selective wiping of the plates and the printing itself.⁸

The prints were first issued in five parts between June and July 1830 and July 1832 in inconsistent intervals. By October 1832, Constable was planning an “Appendix” of subjects that had been excluded from the first series. In Constable’s introduction to the portfolio in its second edition, published in May 1833 and arranged in a different order and with a couple of modifications, he stated that his rationale for making these mezzotints was “to popularize English landscape and to bring the public to appreciate the ‘Chiaroscuro of Nature.’” He further stated that it “originated in no mercenary views, but merely as a pleasing professional occupation, and was continued with a hope of imparting pleasure and instruction to others.” By selecting the intaglio medium of mezzotint, literally “half tone,” in which subtle gradations of light and shade, rather than lines, compose the image, Constable was able to fully exploit the “chiaroscuro” effects, seen in the dramatic contrasts of light and the effects of temperamental weather on natural and architectural elements in each scene. By publishing this portfolio, he aimed to justify his work of the last thirty years and increase his audience.⁹

By 1834 Lucas and Constable also had collaborated on a large print, Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows: The Rainbow, which they revised until the artist’s death. In a letter to Lucas, Constable wrote, “If [the rainbow] is not tender—and elegant—evanescent and lovely . . . we are both ruined.”¹⁰ Constable was planning to continue the print portfolio project but died in 1837 before more could be accomplished. He had previously ridiculed Joseph Mallord William Turner’s print portfolio Liber Studiorum (c. 1806–24) for the small percentage of financial support by the publisher and the ambitious size of the enterprise (of which only seventy-one of the planned hundred plates were finally printed), calling it the “liber stupidorum.”¹¹

The final six plates of the portfolio were decided during Constable’s lifetime but printed in 1838 after his death by the publisher Moon, “for the Proprietors, Constable’s children.”¹² The copyright, plates, and remainder of the stock (more than seven thousand impressions) were at auction at Foster’s on May 12, 1838, but did not sell. Prints relating to this series were next reproduced in Robert Leslie’s Memoirs of the Life of John Constable (1843) and in a smaller octavo edition published by Longman in 1845. In 1846 David Lucas issued “New Series of Engravings, illustrative of English Landscape,” containing two of the six plates first published by Moon.¹³ An additional posthumous edition was issued by H. G. Böhn in 1855.

According to an accompanying letter by Henry Reeve, all of the impressions from the print portfolio in the Stuart Collection were selected for and given by Constable as a presentation copy to Reeve’s mother, who lived near the artist in Hampstead. The Reeve family came from the same part of Suffolk as Constable, and Mrs. Reeve’s husband, Dr. Reeve, was at Dedham Grammar School together with Constable “about the year 1793,” according to the letter. All of the early progress proofs, prior to the edition, are dated 1829, whereas the portfolio was first published in 1832. Long after he had marked proofs to instruct Lucas, Constable enriched certain other impressions of the prints for his own purposes, adjusting the tonality and adding gray and white washes and details. These delicate and subtle retouchings are seen in the Stuart Collection portfolio, such as the birds in the sky added with a brush and gray wash in Mound of the City of Old Sarum (First Plate) and on the tower of the church in Stoke Church, near Neyland, Suffolk and in the dramatic rain clouds enhanced with gray wash in The Nore, Hadleigh Castle, Mouth of the Thames (small plate). For this set, he added a poem by James Thomson, giving words to Constable’s imagery.¹⁴

In the end, the initial publication lacked commercial success, was a financial burden, and curtailed Constable’s hopes of expanding the scope of the project. He often gave copies away to other artists and to friends, as was the case with this example. He commented, “I have thought much on my book, and all my reflections on the subject go to oppress me—its duration, its expense, its hopelessness of remuneration, are all unfavorable.”¹⁵ Nevertheless, the publication served as a vehicle to express Constable’s ideals and theories on landscape painting, and it remains an important record of his work.¹⁶ —Dena M. Woodall