Translated to Borsetshire, John Constable’s courtship of Maria Bicknell would provide more material than any script editor could handle without straining audience impatience beyond endurance. Nine years it took, from initial yearnings and tacit engagement to get them to the altar at St Martin-in-the-Fields and even then, in October 1816, it was the quietest of weddings. Over those years Constable’s ardour was divided. ‘Deplorable as our case is, I would not be without it for the world’, he wrote to his beloved early on when she was at her most inaccessible. That left him plenty of time in which to obsess over his art.
Martin Gayford has an eye for emotionally-charged episodes or ‘detailed microbiography’, as he puts it, set in and around art history. Previously he went into the details of Van Gogh’s disastrous house-share with Gauguin. This time it’s a story even richer in vicissitudes: chapter after chapter leading up to the marriage followed by a mere seven pages of happy-ever-after until 1828 when consumption and excessive child-bearing put an end to poor Maria. The locations are few. There’s the Bicknell residence in Spring Gardens Terrace (off what is now Trafalgar Square), not to be confused with Spring Grove in Worcestershire where Maria was sent to stay with her half- sister, Sarah Skey, at a presumed safe distance from her ineligible swain. And there’s East Bergholt, Ambridge-like in its wealth of stereotypical characters, such as the Grundy-ish Dunthornes, presumed by their betters to be a bad influence on Constable, the handsome young miller’s son from a family that, Archers-like, had gone up in the world.
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