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Thursday 20 November 2008

Wanted! Lost portraits

Martin Gayford on his exhibition of Constable portraits.

The Tate held a great and enormously popular Constable exhibition in 1976 (as it happens, it contained a portrait of the Revd William Walker, for which we have been searching, unsuccessfully). A mere decade afterwards two of the curators of that show suggested another — finally held in 1991 — one of their main motives being to display in public the ‘new’ paintings and drawings that had emerged in just ten years.

There are reasons for this state of affairs. Constable’s portraits — our special interest — were never much valued. They were painted for small fees, and presumably bought by their sitters, or sitters’ families. The known examples, and those mentioned in letters, add up to around 100. There were possibly numerous others, not documented, but lost. Many probably exist, masquerading on somebody’s wall as an anonymous early-19th-century work — maybe there’s one on yours.

Moreover, Constable was prolific in painting small works such as sketches — he could complete a sky study, it seems, in an hour or two. These works were not valued during his lifetime, nor immediately after his sudden death in 1837. At an auction the following year, bundles of Constable’s oil sketches were bought in by friends of the family to prevent their being sold for derisory sums. Eventually, many of these were presented to London museums, notably the V&A, by his daughter Isabel. But others were eventually auctioned and scattered to the four winds. These still reappear quite regularly.

Others are stubbornly elusive. The sole record of a touching group portrait of Constable’s wife, Maria, with four of their children is a photograph in a box file at the Tate, with ‘Private collection, Chicago’ jotted on the back. Two others — quick sketches of the family in their garden in Hampstead — passed through London sale rooms in the last two decades, and promptly vanished. One shows a woman, presumably Maria Constable, holding a parasol, the other has the same woman in the background and in the foreground a young boy playing with a toy cart.

These, from photographs, look wonderfully free, almost impressionist in technique: the oil painting equivalent of a proud father’s holiday snaps. So I end with an appeal. Has anybody seen these pictures? Because, if they have, we’d be very interested in looking at them, too.

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