 All right, well, welcome back, everyone. I'm Mourna O'Neill, and it's my pleasure to chair session five for today. I don't want to say the final session, but maybe we could say last but not least. And it's my pleasure to introduce each speaker in turn, and then we'll have our questions at the end. So please join me in welcoming Ran Addison McCraner. She is the Arts and Humanities Research Council collaborative PhD student at the University of York and Tate, Britain, researching landscape artist studios in London 1780 to 1850. She was awarded funding by the PMC to co-convene the spatial 18th century, rethinking urban networks and maps 1650 to 1850. And she received a research support grant to develop case studies on George Moorland and John Constable. Previously, she was curator of historic fine art at the Whitworth University of Manchester and assistant curator at the Watts Gallery Artists Village. Please join me in welcoming Ran. So before I talk about my chosen letter, I want to provide you with some context of my research. My thesis, Indoor Spaces for Outdoor Minds, Landscape Artist Studios in London 1780 to 1850, explores the irony that rural landscapes were being painted in urban London. The outside world was being created within the limits of a room. The research employs a multi-scaler, mixed methodologies, starting with the landscape artist community on a macro level of London and metaphorically speaking, zooming into the studio. My case study on John Constable investigates for the first time the significance of his urban studios on the creation of his works. My research has established that Constable and so many of his colleagues were caught in an urban rural dichotomy, which saw landscape artists equally reliant on and restricted by the urban environment in the construction and reception of their works. There are no visual representations of Constable Studios, which has meant existing historiography often skirts around how his spaces were used and experienced. The most recent and explicit consideration of Constable Studios contents was featured in the V&A's 2014 exhibition, The Making of a Master. However, it was Sarah Coe's physical analysis of Constable's works, which I directly addresses how Constable Studios and practices shaped his works, serving as the foundation for the Tate in 1991 and 2006 exhibitions. I do not mean to overlook all the other people involved in that, but I very much draw on Sarah's chapters for those, for my research. With no visual representation of Constable Studios, Arby Beckett's edited volumes of Constable's correspondences provide valuable insight. However, and these are my opinions, other people might feel differently, we're reliant on Beckett's often estimated dating and his interpretation of many of the letters, some of which are fragmented. And the categorisations are, for me, anyway, very frustrating that rather than being, they're divided by who the correspondence is with. And for me, I lose a considerable amount of context of what else is going on in his studio and his life. And it required me, for my research, to hop back and forth between volumes, constantly losing my thread of thought. And sometimes I found contradictions in Beckett between each of his volumes when he's describing certain events. Even once these quotients have been acknowledged, the correspondence provide valuable descriptions of Constable Studios. So, like so many of you here today, I've not seen the original letter which I will be discussing, and I'm solely reliant on Beckett's transcription, which equates to two pages. On the 30th of June, 1813, Constable wrote from 63 Charlotte Street to his future wife, Maria Bicknell. In Constable's own words, quote, I'm merely mentioning facts as they have occurred to me within the last two or three months. End quote. Don't worry, I'm not reading this whole thing. I'll give, I'm firing through. He describes his travel plans to Suffolk, how they were postponed by demand for portraits. That his price per head was 15 guineas at the time. An ongoing commission by Lady Heathcote, that for the first time he's leaving London free of debt and has required no financial support from his father. His travel plans to stay with Sir Thomas Leonard, possibly at Bellhoose in Essex. His personal anguish over the lack of warmth from Maria's father. Dinner at the Royal Academy the previous Monday, where he sat with Benjamin West, Thomas Lawrence and Turner, and has a good little moan about Turner's behavior. Talks about a letter of encouragement from John Fisher and closes, oh, I've gone too quickly, and closes with a post script about his mother's health. But today I'll be focusing two paragraphs in the middle of the letter. We are now repairing the house here with a thorough painting, and I shall leave orders about the back drawing room. The paper will be a sort of salmon color and the sofa and chairs crimson by Lady Heathcote's advice. I think they will suit pictures, but I'm indifferent about show, though all insist upon it. I ought to have at least one room in tolerable order. My front room where I paint shall be done with a sort of purple brown from the floor to the ceiling, not sparing even the doors or door posts for white is disagreeable to a painter's eyes near pictures. Following the methodology of my thesis of zooming into the studio, I will begin by looking at the wider community of landscape artists on Charlotte Street, then at number 63 itself from which the letter was written. Finally, I'm going to return to the descriptions in the letter. Sarah has argued that painting exhibition works exclusively in the Charlotte Street studio, quote, affected the character of Constable's paintings and his technique, end quote, which I very much agree. And these paragraphs caught my attention because Constable is actively engaging with the construction of his studio, which in turn shaped his works. I will also consider Constable's feelings on display and presentation and how this manifested in his studio practice. By combining location data, archival material and existing scholarship, this paper will build on Constable's description to reimagine his studio at 63 Charlotte Street. But please don't get your hopes up because there is no 3D digital projection, which I believe some people might have thought I'd be producing, sorry. Charlotte Street was ideally located a 25-minute walk to the Royal Academy at Somerset House, a half-hour walk to the Thames. Oh, no, sorry, it's me. I'm looking at too many screams. I'll start again. Charlotte Street was ideally located a 25-minute walk to the Royal Academy at Somerset House, a half-hour walk to the Thames, access to open spaces with regions parked in the north, and near the wealthier area of Mayfair where artists could access patrons. As was noted earlier, the road has always been popular with artists, columnar and frame makers and engravers, however, there's never been a macro analysis of whom passed through the street or the significance of their genre. I have mapped 23 landscape artists who resided on Charlotte Street between 1780 and 1850, some of whom returned on multiple occasions. Whilst there are over another 100 landscape artists listed on a Charlotte Street in my database, it was not possible to be certain that this was the correct Charlotte Street, so as there are so many in Georgia and London, so it was decided that this should not be necessarily plotted until I was certain. But the street was at its most popular with landscape artists between 1810 and 1819. Charlotte Street offered cheap rooms, which were ideal if a landscape artist were visiting London for the exhibition season. However, at the other end of the scale, artists who were wealthy by independent means, such as Farrington, would build extensions to accommodate their practice. Farrington's home studio at 35 Charlotte Street would, of course, later become constables. Farrington lived at 35 Charlotte Street for 39 years, which is highly unusual for a landscape artist, but this is why, for me, the mapping is really important to show the real disparity between all the fact that it was more common. Anyway, for landscape artists to have lodgings that the likes of Farrington, who a lot has known about, was actually unusual in having only one major property. Number 63 was situated on the west side of the street, almost opposite Farrington's property. George Moreland was the first landscape artist we're aware of lodging here. Moreland's notorious lifestyle of drinking and debt has prevailed in our historical memory sometimes more than his works. By 1792, Moreland was legally bound to pay his creditors 120 pounds per month, just a huge amount, to consolidate his debts and was housed at number 63 to ensure he was consistent with his repayments. 63 Charlotte Street is quite a nice way to really have to be forced by your creditors, isn't it? 63 Charlotte Street was described as an elegant house with garden, coach house, and stables. Moreland purportedly isolated himself in his painting room, eating at his easel with dogs and pigeons for company. During Moreland's residency, there were four other landscape artists on the street, which included Farrington, Henry Burlard Chalon, Peter Francis Bourgeois, and Francis Wheatley. Before Charlotte Street, Wheatley and Moreland had already published a print series together with Moreland learning from the older artist whose rustic scenes were arguably the precursor to Moreland's. Their working relationship likely continued as they both moved to Queen Anne Street for a similar period. Although Moreland lived on Charlotte Street for less than two years, we can see the friendships and networks available from landscape artists, let alone from artists of other subjects. 17 years later in 1811, Constable would move into number 63. Constable had 12 addresses in London over 38 years. Like so many other landscape artists, he spent the first decade of his career staying at different lodging houses when he returned from his travels. In March 1810, Constable moved to Frith Street. However, Frith Street did not meet the approval of his mother, Anne Constable. In November 1811, Anne expressed her concerns that this truly undesirable chamber was affecting her son's health, which may have pushed Constable to leave Frith Street. For several weeks, he stayed with fellow Academy student John Jackson at Seven Newman Street. By the start of December 1811, Constable was settled at 63 Charlotte Street. Throughout this talk, I will also be referring to his last two London properties which became family homes and contained studios. One Keppel Street and 35 Charlotte Street. I should add for the sake of my thesis, Hampstead at the time was not considered part of London, so many more studios be on this, but I'm focusing on Central London. 63 Charlotte Street was to be Constable's longest period in lodgings from December 1811 to July 1816, whereas Moreland had had the whole property, Constable leased rooms on the first floor above the cabinetmaker and upholsterer Richard Waite. His studio was the front room, which would have had consistent northeasterly light and was likely the same room used by Moreland for painting. Whilst there are no surviving images of 63 Charlotte Street or its interior, unless anyone discovers one, let me know. Fertuitously, the landscape and figure painter, William James Moeller drew the inside of his studio at 22 Charlotte Street. On the east side of the street, Moeller's front floor studio would have had less light than Moreland and Constable at number 63. In this confident stretch, Moeller places an emphasis on the contents of the room. Dominating it is a large-framed paintings, perhaps ruins at Gornu, Egypt, which was a waiting transportation to the Royal Academy. Works are pinned and hanging on the wall with more canvases and frames stacked against the back wall. Around the table, several other artists are still absorbed by the work. Whilst it was likely that Moeller had several rooms to live and work in, this sketch shows the limited studio space an artist on Charlotte Street realistically had. From his own descriptions, it is likely that Constable had at least three rooms in 63 Charlotte Street, a back drawing room, or parlour, his front room for painting, and another room for sleeping. So with all that context, I want to return to the focus on Constable's letter. In the first line, Constable mentions repairs as eight months earlier, a fire had broken out at 63 Charlotte Street. The repairs provided Constable with an opportunity to reflect on how the space could be reconstructed and how it could shape his works, likely giving him more autonomy than in his previous lodgings. At this time, we must bear in mind that Constable's studio, as we've heard earlier, had a dual practice, a space for experimenting with landscape, but also copying and executing portraits. Constable's studio was to be painted, quote, with a sort of purple brown from the floor to ceiling, not sparing either door posts, doors or door posts, for white is disagreeable to a painter's eyes in your pictures. Now, I find this really interesting. To me, this suggests that Constable believed the purple brown was neutral, and now I'm gonna look into George Fielding for more on this, but this suggests that Constable believed the purple brown was neutral and less likely to influence the palette of his works, that the only bright color would be on the canvas, indicating to him whether he had captured a natural light source. In addition, the purple brown walls were perhaps intended to absorb any glare from the sun. In February, 1814, seven months after writing the letter, Constable was struggling to add warmth to a plowing scene in Suffolk. This painting was constructed in the studio based on sketches that he had made the previous year. Whilst Constable was anticipating white paint causing distraction, the purple brown walls would likely have worsened the lighting conditions, especially in midwinter, when he would realistically have had six hours of daylight to work by and otherwise had to resort to candlelight. Unable to resolve the issue within the confines of the purple brown studio, Constable pledged that he would prepare on-planar oil sketches going forward, thereby providing himself with a reliable source material for representing natural light. In the same season, spring, 1814, Constable painted the ferry in the studio, but this time utilizing on-planar sketches. Comparison of two oil sketches shows Constable's decision within the studio to represent the ferry with a placid sky with light cloud coverage rather than heavily impastoed, textured bright blue sky of the on-planar sketches. Well, this is turning out better than my computer screen, but I still think the reproductions don't do it justice. Whilst many of the features highlighted by the sun are the same in the exhibition work, the overall hues are considerably lighter and the colors more refined. This is unsurprising when we consider that the limited palette Constable would have had painting on-planar, but it also makes us consider how the lighting and wall colors of his studio could have influenced his decision to use a lighter palette. Whilst Constable is explicit about his intentions for 63 Charlotte Street, I've not come across any works, the background of portraits, for example, which may reflect this decision, and now I'm rethinking having seen Sarah's talk on overpainting and what could some of the portraits reflect the studio setting. It is therefore not clear where the Constable's conviction to use purple-brown walls continued or if he branched out to use other colors in his other studios. 63 Charlotte Street also shaped the scale of Constable's works. Yes, Sarah, I'm sorry, I'm using centimeters. I've never worked an inches in my life. The ferry was the largest work Constable has painted to date. For some context, here it is in relation to a ploughing scene in Suffolk, which was much smaller than a Kit Kat canvas. The two works were painted in the same studio in the same season, and yet, as Cove has identified, the increase in canvas size correlates with Constable's decision to stay in London. This is reinforced by a letter from Constable's brother Abraham, who wrote in December 1816 that the belongings from Constable's East Burgall studio were on their way to London, including pictures, sketches, umbrella, flutes, and books, and a large case. As we saw in Muller's sketch, Constable's working space would have been limited, so increasing canvas sizes and housing more equipment would have been not only a financial investment, but also acquiring more space and transporting these works to another studio. If we also consider Constable's experimental wall colours, it is arguable that the tendency at 63 Charlotte Street was phasing his permanent move to London. Constable was also explicit about the back-drawing room of 63 Charlotte Street, that it was to be decorated with salmon, walls, and crimson upholstered furniture. He credits the suggestion to Lady Heathcote for whom at the time, and as I mentioned earlier, he was completing several portrait commissions. Whilst he acknowledges the salmon will suit the pictures, he states he himself, quote, is indifferent about show, though all insist upon it. His studio was perhaps not presentable, as figures under a donkey on the late lane from East Burgall to Flatford, painted at 63 Upper Charlotte Street or Upper Merrillbone Street, was left lying around the studio for years, resulting in dust embedded in the paint layers and plaster. This picture of neglect, however, is contradicted by the Tate 2006 exhibition catalogue which suggests that the careful handling of Flatford Mill reflects that 63 Charlotte Street may actually have been a tidy workspace. In the same year as figures under donkey was painted, Constable's brother Golding recommended that the artist focus on works which he could sell so as to not accumulate lumber, evoke a workshop rather than aesthetically pleasing studio. Over a decade later in the Somerset House cassette, William Henry Pine reinforces this scene of chaos by describing that Constable's paintings, including the Hayway, accumulated dust as they hung obsolete on his walls, at 63 Charlotte Street. These examples perhaps explain why it is often concluded that Constable took little care for the display of his works. Though he claimed to be indifferent, examining Constable's activity across his studios shows that 63 Charlotte Street was in fact a turning point for Constable who learnt the benefits of display. It was at 1 Keppel Street that Constable identified a site of professional activity. Little is known about the property but once again Constable's studio was on the first floor where he could get the best light. With visitors regularly present for portrait sittings, Constable was considerable of display, hanging up only decent works as he intended to pay my court to the world in an attempt of self-promotion. Constable was making efforts to show potential patrons how advantageous his works looked in a domestic setting, a precursor to his own gallery at 35 Charlotte Street. At 35 Charlotte Street I know I'm getting a lot of studios in here, at 35 Charlotte Street Constable placed value on people entering the studio. He wrote that it was an advantage for the works to be seen together and to promote their varieties of conception and execution as they were too harsh upon their creation and gained by the mellowing hand of time. Constable's phrasing implies he was taking advantage of displaying ongoing projects alongside one another as part of his performance as an artist. A visit to the inner sanctum was promoted as a privilege where one could witness languishing works, works in progress and reference material. Cumulatively, there was a demonstration where Constable's six footer sketches were rolled and stored which suggests they were unlikely intended for public consumption and reflects his conscious curating of his studio contents. Although Constable learnt the benefits of display over time, a picture of chaos can be built from the snippets of description about these later studios. Constable would have letters scattered around his paintbrushes or potentially hanging off his easel. His daughter Maria resorted to tidying sections. Canvases were stacked up so he struggled to locate them without assistance and the shipping of his works had to be prioritised to make more space. Perhaps the disregard for presentation incurred in peaks and troughs throughout Constable's career or was mitigated by others such as John Dunthorne and Charles Bonner. In an 1825 letter to Francis Derby a potential buyer, Constable described each work, their dimensions as well as costs including packing, framing packing. Each work had a unique identifying number suggesting they related to a ledger or catalogue and I thought I wasn't going to mention it but he also was cataloging English landscape, categorising the prints for the appendix according to their paper support in preparation for sale. Constable's cataloging practices certainly contrast with the early suggestion that the works were stacked inaccessible and a mess. So to conclude the world is wide, no two days are alike nor even two hours and the genuine productions of art like those of nature are all distinct from each other. As with Constable's observation that no two works are alike nor with the studios in which were always evolving. Whilst the letter in question describes Constable's attentions for his wall colours at 63 Charlotte Street we must remember it captures only a fleeting moment in his studio practices. For my research Constable's letters or more specifically Beckett's volumes have served as a catalyst for discussion rather than providing many clear answers. Were Constable's plans for the wall colours executed? Did he approve of the results? Did he repeat them at Keppel Street, 35 Charlotte Street or any of his studios outside of London? Can further links be made between works created in the spaces and the wall colour? Two things are clear. Firstly it was at 63 Charlotte Street that Constable understood how the studio space would shape his works and secondly he began to appreciate that being an artist was as much about self-promotion and presentation as it was about completing his works. Certainly the wall colours at 63 Charlotte Street were a precursor for his later decisions. Upon the completion of renovations at 35 Charlotte Street 12 years after the letter in question Constable reflected on the transformations of Farrington's Bachelor House with his quote, Attic's turned into nurseries, a beautiful baby born in his bedroom. His wash houses turned into a brew house, his back parlour which contained all his prints turned into a bedroom, his painting room made habitable, besides which his best of all made to produce better pictures than he could make. Constable unabashedly attributed his intervention with the studio as having a direct impact on the quality of the works produced within its walls. Thank you. Well, thank you so much, Rhianne and please let me introduce our speaker, Nicholas Robbins. He's a lecturer in British art at University College London and he's currently writing a book on the aesthetic, scientific and cultural history of climate in 19th century Britain. His recent article reexamining the relationship of John Constable and Luke Howard's meteorological aesthetics received the 2022 Emerging Scholars Award from the 19th Century Studies Association. His talk is entitled, The Life Academy in the Origins of Landscape. Mourna, and thank you to Mark and Steve for having me and to all of you and hopefully you can bear with me for the last of our talks tonight. In his lectures on landscape, or at least in the form of the lectures which has come down to us through Arby Beckett's reconstructions, John Constable described his ambitions for his account of the genre's history. Quote, I propose to trace landscape to its source to follow its progress to its final success, to show how by degrees it assumed form until at last it became a distinct and separate class of painting standing alone when from the humble assistant it became the powerful auxiliary to that art which gave it birth, greatly enriching the dignity of history. We might identify in this passage a whole mixing of metaphorical language which seeks to make figural Constable's conception of landscape. The genre itself is imagined to assume form like a kind of organized being in space which slowly begins to articulate its autonomous life. Having assumed form it becomes distinct and separate standing alone. Landscape is described thus as a kind of figure and because standing a human figure that slowly emerges from its invironing circumstance of development. This more loosely corporeal language is then concretized into a protagonist. If landscape was once a humble assistant it now stands apart and yet not quite separate from history painting. An auxiliary to which it is also affiliated double that takes the form of a child birthed from history painting. I open with this passage from his lectures to frame the following discussion which seeks to understand the intersections of landscape and the body across Constable's art and writing in the early 1830's. I want to take up the idea that landscape painting might for Constable be seen to have its origins not only in the form of nature to which he most assiduously attempted to yoke his paintings that is the natural world of rural England but also in a nature that was staged and re-articulated in the space of the academy in the form of the human body. And so in the spirit of this conference which takes its name from and Birmingham's deconstruction of Constable's language of nature and naturalization this paper will look at the way in which his thinking about landscape was rooted within the procedures of the academy in the lecture hall as much as it was within the encounter with nature to create in his correspondence. Here I turn to a letter that Constable wrote to C.R. Leslie on January 4th 1831. In it he not so humbly describes his first experience as visitor to the life academy at the Royal Academy. This job of visiting the academy and setting up the life models for students to draw was rotated among different academicians. Quote, I set my date and figure yesterday and it is exceedingly like, old Eddie congratulated me upon it. Do come and see it, it is the same girl I had with me when you called. She makes a most delightful eve and I have put her in paradise leaving out Adam. I have dressed up a bower of laurels and I have put in her hand the forbidden fruit. In my address to the students I said they probably expected a landscape background from me. Prithee come and see her for I am quite popular in the life. This letter presents a constable that however anxious and sometimes oppositional he was regarding the institutions of art is markedly sociable. Pleased to be popular in the life and pleased to be congratulated by his fellow life, his fellow academician and life drawing obsessive William Eddie on which more later. Constable's choice of subject even paradise leaving out Adam also brings our attention immediately to the way sexual difference determined the dynamics of life drawing and the dual inanimacy and personhood of the life model that powered the fantasies of contact and animation that ripple through 19th century art. Both of these questions of constable's sociability and of the articulation of capricious authority over the life model who switches between a maiden figure it, girl and her are obviously very important. But is the last point that he makes that he would be expected to provide and indeed did provide a landscape background that I will look at as it opens out on to broader questions about constable's understanding of the relationship of the figure to its surrounding environment. Like all students at the Royal Academy constable's early training there was marked by an aimed toward his progression to the life academy where the requisite skills for drawing and modeling the body could be gained and I must say I've learned all I know about this from Martin Possel's work. Needing first to progress through the antique academy in which casts of sculpture would be studied to develop students' skills which you see on the left the attainment to the life academy was seen as the final and most important progression through the academy's relatively stable and fixed curriculum since its founding. Many of constable's life studies have come down to us through the family collections and the dispersal of his studio. What we find in them is a young artist remarkably attuned to the demands of drawing from the life. In this drawing in the Victorian Albert Museum we are presented with a brilliant tonal range in which the body is a luminous substance that appears almost carved out of the darker tone of the grey paper on which it is made. By contrast though to this quite subtle modeling of the body and the catching of its contours in light white chalk there are also a number of dark repeated strangely intense marks which are used to produce the deep shadow cast by the body on the couch on which it's posed as well as the strong shadow cast by the left arm of the model over his torso. In this drawing we see how constable is thus interested in the aerial space that surrounds the figure and the chiaroscuro generated by the presence of the model in space. This concern is thus not just with the way light falls on the body from the space surrounding it where the body is a kind of receptacle for light dependent upon its conditions of visibility but also how the body casts its own luminous and adambrated reflections around it seen particularly in the complicated bands of light and shadow which delineate the edge of his left flank. Similar moments in which constable picks out this kind of flickering passage between the model and its surrounding the model's kind of independence and dependence upon its surrounding props abound in constable's life drawings. Here to understand a bit about what he might have been trying to do we can turn back to some of the statements that he made about his art and the way in which the Life Academy was or at least was framed as a crucible for his thinking about the relationship of objects to one another and about the overall matrix of pictorial perception that was chiaroscuro. For his biography of the artist C.R. Leslie solicited a letter from Daniel McLeese who had been a student at the time constable was a visitor to the Life Academy. McLeese didn't really have much to say though he did comment on the so-called picturesque accompaniments that constable conceived for his life models. But in the biography Leslie goes a bit further introducing a footnote to McLeese's letter expanding on what he takes to be the significance of the remark. This reminds me Leslie wrote of what I often heard constable say that he could never look at any object unconnected with a background or other objects and that he thought the students might very advantageously be taught at an early age to look at nature this way. For this reason all his figures were set with backgrounds or other accompaniments. In some ways the statement which Leslie attributes to constable here is a kind of uncomplicated and commonplace statement about the co-constitution of figure and ground. It constitutes its own pictorial or visual world only in its relationship to other objects or to its background. We might thus see the congruence of constable's understanding of pictorial space with essential precepts of European academic art like Roger De Peel's well-known discussion of the two ensemble in which effective claire obscure is instantiated only by this interlocking effect of grouped objects. But as Leslie relates constable felt that by teaching students to look at objects in this expanded environment surrounding they would also be able to better apprehend nature itself. A way of seeing nature that is which could be taught in the space of the academy and in order to do so he set his figures in the life academy not as stand-alone objects but as set into landscapes of a kind. But it's only through a humorous make to hope that constable in the letter I'm discussing today relays the pains to which he's gone to secure this landscape background for his eve. I spare neither pains nor expense to become a good academician for your sake he says to Leslie perhaps more than my own. It cost me ten shillings from my garden of Eden besides my men being twice stopped on Sunday evening by the police with the green bows coming from Hampstead thinking as was the case they had robbed some gentleman's garden. Of course this passage sets up this very interesting relay between constables Hampstead and Somerset House where the life academy was and reminds us that new forces of oversight and law that is not God but the police were in charge of policing nature in 1831. But it also shows constable trying however riley to be a good academician to teach his students to see nature in the relationship between the human form and this garden of green bows to found their relationship to the old masters given that indeed this pose of eve was based on a fresco by Raphael to see the old masters through an assemblage of human and natural forms that lended each other figural legibility. So given the long standing interest in the slippage around and the presence of human figures and especially laboring human figures in constables paintings we might take the scenario constable staged at the life academy to think again about the relationship between the figure and the landscape in constables exhibition paintings take his upright painting the lock of 1824 here as the red-shirted labor opens the gates of a lock in the river star navigation we see a perhaps unusually strong gestural core around which the painting operates as many have noted the poses itself perhaps consciously or unconsciously deeply congruent with the kinds of poses that were held at the life academy such as his own remarkable such as we see in this really remarkable oil sketch the commonplace convention of the academy is thus transfigured into a kind of mechanism whereby the action of the laborer's body is knitted into the force of the landscape around him by the work he exerts on the locks gate the water behind him will flow producing a chain of potential energies that ramifies not only in this pent up water but also in the arching tree bow behind the laborer circling through the diagonal wooden beam that we see here and extending through the rising arc of darkening cloud the mobile coherence we might say or the life that he was looking for in his work as Gillian showed us of the landscape flows from the body into the surrounding world but in a relationship that moves both inwards and outwards from the figure one way of understanding these correspondences is to look at constable's work alongside that of the fellow academician he mentions in his 1831 letter to Leslie William Eddie as Martin Myron and others have articulated Eddie was notorious for his devotions to the life academy and to drawing and painting from the nude to the extent that it was understood as a kind of liability he also like constable believed in the uncommon practice of setting models within larger surrounding to blow constable and Eddie's participation in the life formed a basis for a continued exchange throughout the 1830s and considering their critical fate somewhat surprising how closely related and almost difficult to disambiguate the two artists' life studies are yet look at Eddie's musadora the bather at the doubtful breeze alarmed a subject he first exhibited six years after constable's death one of Eddie's prototypically sensuous and almost alarmingly crisp figures is set into a landscape that seems all but copied and enlarged from one of constable's own Eddie uses the breeze and the bloom of a constable like landscape to lend animation to his figure gathering up all the energies of this fluid painterly world into the startling surface of the body itself constable's paintings meanwhile suggest how that the energy of the body comes instead to radiate outwards animating the world in a kind of back and forth the body is there so that the landscape can be seen in connection to it just as the landscape is there to articulate the body's connection to place so what does this have to do then with constable's understanding of landscape as a whole it seems significant that in the mid 1830s following this first stint at the life academy this was also the moment in which his lectures on landscape were being delivered right where he was articulating landscape paintings dual development through and disarticulation from the figural preoccupations of history painting here we can turn back to constable's lectures and to the work which he alongside many others deemed the very origins of landscape Titian St. Peter martyr for constable the background of Titian's alter piece though not the direct model is the quote foundation of all styles of landscape in every school of Europe in the following century in his lecture he first describes the setting quote level and placid movements of the clouds on the deep blue sky the grandeur and the low horizon the birds nest with its callow brood in the trees yet within this quote scene of amenity and repose we are quote startled by a scene of utmost terror this scene in which St. Peter martyr is assailed his body contorted in fear so much depends on constable upon this contrast in his account of this quote deed of horror perpetrated with the utmost energy of action contrasted with the seeming stillness of the environing world an energy concentrated on the prone body of the martyred monk which is acted on from without illuminated by what he calls a bright and supernatural light constable produced an enormous life size drawing of this figure indeed for his lectures in 1836 copied from a drawing that was in Thomas Lawrence's collection which at that point was thought to be by Titian constable's lecture diagram stages a sense of undecidability about the body's disposition whether the martyr at this point of death is shown pointing downward toward the earth or facing upward to the sky it was this latter position of precarious embodiment that Titian painted in the final version of the altarpiece that is looking up and it was this kind of vulnerable body that in his life academy studies as a student constable would be taught was at the origin of art itself and it is perhaps this almost perilous openness of the body of the fallen martyr the object of these forces surrounding it yet which is also the subject that springs the whole space of the picture into life which his lectures framed as the very fulcrum or spring of landscape's perception it is perhaps not a surprise then that following the series of lectures he delivered in 1835 and 36 that for his for when he returned to the life academy as a visitor in 1836 he would decide to set three models in the very poses of St. Peter martyr and he writes to Leslie in 1836 my month with the school is March I have three men and one woman allotted to my share I have concluded on the three figures in the Peter martyr for I am determined to sift that picture to the bottom so there was still something of the power of these figures and that he needed to be working out what we might see here is a relay between the activities that populated the space around constables painting practice which ultimately suggests landscapes dependence on certain forms of the human body's disposition which was or at least could be worked through in the space of the academy and although much more would remain to be said on this point if in his engagement with Titian's altarpiece the protagonist of landscape is male the differently vulnerable body of the female model of his Eve whose goose flesh the painter comments upon with predictable interest yet which also signals in a different way the body's responsibility played some other perhaps more submerged role but I want to conclude by asking briefly what this means for constables later work in the 1830s his attempts to produce a historical subject perhaps in relation to English landscape scenery but to other projects too led him to make numerous drawings of Jacques and the wounded stag an episode drawn from as you like it here the triadic encounter of Jacques the deer and the surrounding woodland become enmeshed in constables calligraphic line producing an all over texture that knits each part together and in doing so obliterates the spatial its spatial and figurative legibility Jacques body appears to extend upward into the form of trees and foliage which themselves disperse into a surrounding atmosphere of marks and touches it is thus paradoxically when exiting landscape for history painting returning to its origins we might say or re-emerging its body within that of history painting that we could see how constables figure fails to emerge from its background thank you I think that those were two wonderful papers and that we probably have a lot to talk about we have a few minutes for questions and I would just remind you to identify yourself before you speak for those who are online so do you have questions for either of our speakers to start with I'm just fascinated by the oh beg your pardon hello yeah Charlotte Street and the decoration and Lady Heathcoats role she's always there she's doing stuff she's organizing the wars say a bit more about why her, why she there I have not gone into that Martin I have to be honest I had to draw a line as to how far the research went but she's definitely a character that pops up again and again it's interesting just about Sarah remind me of the name of the portrait earlier that you were talking about yeah I wonder whether it was a more reciprocal relationship forced relationship under how Constable would have reacted to Lady Heathcoat advising and in fact the colours when the Trostlov portraits came up earlier I immediately went oh pink dress red background this sounds like the draw this sounds like 63 Charlotte Street and yeah the fashion no I do need to look more into the interior fashion of the time yeah because she's actually rather interesting I mean it says in your footnote here she's the daughter of Lady Louisa Manners and you know there's those paintings by Constable the copies of Hopner and Reynolds of her mother and her and she is really a kind of big socialite he also paints a copy of Hopner's picture of her as Hebe yeah so she's kind of it's very interesting that it's a very good point about the lady the other blousy lady that he's also painting she's in a different league though yeah but I would be interested to shame there isn't more he doesn't elaborate more on his reaction to her initial proposal because he's saying oh I'm indifferent to it but he's clearly taking on board the feedback that actually maybe I should listen to this advice even if it's not for me maybe it will make a difference this stage in his life I mean he's about to get wed and all that sort of thing he's got this posh lady who's telling him how to decorate a house but then clearly by the time he gets to 35 Charlotte Street you know he's like well Farrington this is my opportunity to really state how the space is going to be Yes John Day John Chrome the Norwich School Painter he was the founder of the Norwich Society in 1804 or the co-founder it's recorded his studio the large outdoor studio was painted in pale blue inside so presumably there isn't a standard colour for artist studios sorry it was painted in pale blue pale blue inside of the studio as opposed to a much darker shade that Constance will prefer That's what struck me about the colour was that it is very dark and intense whereas the walls of the academy were pale, well they were green weren't they and then the British Institute was like a dark like an intense red is that right well think you think you're the paintings of the interior of the British Institute so it's just yeah it's interesting to think that that dark purple brown is quite dramatic and would have even if it had a negative effect it would have had some effect if nothing else to depress you like sitting there day and day This is going raking back into my memory from I don't know how long but when he moves into Farrington's house he has this corridor between the main part of the house and the studio back and he talks about painting the walls of this corridor in what I envisage like a sort of ox blood red I can't remember the exact quote at this point and obviously these reddish brown colours against the greens and the yellows and all the rest of it in the paintings are going to make an enormous difference to how you view the painting and he is hanging his paintings on the walls of this sort of corridor so that people can come in and view and the interesting thing was that when the Washington great landscapes exhibition was on in 2007 they excuse me they did the walls of so I had written this essay with all this detailed information about how comfortable wanted his paintings hung deep reddish brown and they did the decor of the exhibition in what you might call sort of wedge wood colours which was a blue not unlike this and a sort of green like a wedge wood green and I being me went in to the first room and went oh my god it looks so dreadful what have they done like within the hearing with the director of the museum which was really not very tactful anyway this was also within the hearing it went round like Chinese whispers it was really quite embarrassing when it moved to the Huntingdon in California they off the back of that essentially had done the walls in the dark reddish brown with the same paintings the same exhibition and it looked utterly transport and the paintings kind of shone so he knew what he was doing absolutely there you know it wasn't some random colour that he just picked out of the air when he says white is distracting to a painter's eyes near paintings and for me that kind of that's interesting people's opinions resonated that well that means that when he does capture natural light or gets the tone he wants he's only getting that from the painting that is the light source but he's also always from day one using either a dark reddish brown or some shade of pink under painting and so the wall colour with daylight is bringing that out it's like when you get your due luxe paint or something and it has an undertone of something that you don't necessarily see and then you switch on your artificial light and it looks a completely different colour so there's all of these kind of really subtle things coming in about that you know anyway I'd love to know though if anyone finds any other evidence whether he ever repeated it in any other studio it would be fascinating thank you I just found it sort of electrifying this story that you tell the emergence of the body from landscape and then back into it fantastic as far as I remember when Constance was thinking his way through the emergence of landscape he's comparing Northern and Southern schools very carefully and saying that North alone could not make landscape great and I just wondered whether you see a clear story of how he's mapping that relationship between body and landscape onto that Northern Southern imaginative geography yeah that's a good question the one that comes to mind from the lectures is actually in characteristic form takes opportunity to sort of put the French down and talks about David and the kind of relentless outline that surrounds his bodies versus just a bit after he talks about Rubens who's this kind of weird figure then as both North and South so maybe he's the one because he could do the kind of North and he could bring a kind of a verb and a sensibility that was from the South if we're using that period language right but it also has to do with the kind of boundedness of the forms in the paintings and so for him the thing that is horrible about David's outline is it bounds the figures to the Earth they can't separate they're sort of too stuck whereas Rubens is able to kind of imagine that kind of energy surrounding the body but it's a really, it's a great question thank you yeah I've got a question for Nick following on from that I was, I've always been really struck by something that Constable scholars and I've not really done this either have really done with Constable which might, maybe because it seems maybe too crude and too basic and maybe even wrong headed but I was very struck that when the works for Bermont include a history seen from Claude which includes three very small figures all of whom are very directly echoed but amplified in the movement of the trees above them and then looking at the way in which that Titian painting becomes so important to to Constable it's always made me wonder about the way we don't really think about the astonishing vitality and dynamism of his trees the substitutes for or the equivalence of figures in history painting but if you start looking at his paintings with the idea that the trees and the bands of trees and the individual trees have the same kind of role within them and energize their narratives and their dynamics and their atmospheres in the way that figures are famously doing a history painting you see them in a very different way and it seems as if so much of that desire to give landscape the kind of authority and the ambition of history painting is done through this form of kind of substitution and I don't want to get too Hansel and Gretelish about this imagine all of these trees as anthropomorphic living figures but on the other hand I think we've been blind to the fact that they play a really powerful dramatic role and that's so clearly the case surely with Titian where those trees are doing as a much exciting work visually in relation to conveying a scene as the figures are and actually I should say Constable also that's a really great suggestion Constable made drawings of the trees to which went somewhere from his studio sale so maybe we can find them but I think it's that kind of individuality that the tree represents in a kind of natural history that is so interesting for him as well as the trees there's also timber if you look at the lock again a really important is the structure where next to the figure which echoes the figure and the support which is taking all the stress right and so what you're having there is a kind of an assemblage of construction and figure so it's tree but it's also machine we've sort of moved from timber or from lumber lumber and timber exactly no but absolutely sort of a skeleton almost but the force is pushing well I think in the interest of time we should end this part of the conversation there but thank you both so much I'd like to welcome our two discussants I'll introduce them and then they'll each speak so first Timothy Wilcox, Tim Wilcox who after a career in curating has had a wonderfully productive second life as a freelance curator and lecturer and I want to emphasize two books in particular which have been referred to today enormously influential on Constable and Salisbury The Soul of Landscape in 2011 and his contribution to the volume on Constable in the Lake District Tim and on my left is Trope Broughton who is a reader emeritus at the University of York and I mentioned it in my introduction but Trope has published enormously widely on 19th century life writing including biography or autobiography but two absolutely key articles on Constable's correspondence one in 19th century studies which really influenced Mark and I on setting up this conference today so what I'm going to do is to ask Tim to speak first with his reflections and comments on the day followed by Trope Well I'd certainly like to begin by thanking all the speakers for giving us the most incredible day completely spinning really but in a good way I'd also particularly like to thank Rhian for flashing up on the screen the letter of 13th of June 1813 was it the evening when Constable sat at the Royal Academy dinner next to Turner and of course it's always so conventional in this period to pit Constable against Turner I think one of the interesting features about today is that Turner has hardly been mentioned at all we've had a wonderful day in the company of Constable without even thinking about Turner but of course that remark which is so often quoted as Constable says that I found him uncouth a wonderful range of mind and James Hamilton's already reminded us that we have this tendency to think of Constable as the sort of home boy the man who's the man of feeling wedded to his home landscape always thinking about his boyhood whereas through contact with these letters we've got a sense of Constable's involvement in a very wide society and I think it certainly struck me that whereas we call them Constable's letters as Alexander Harris said all of these letters are proto conversations there are two people and so these are not just Constable's letters but the letters of hundreds of people with whom he corresponded and there are window into a whole social world at this period and since I'm working in the 18th century at the moment thinking very much about patronage and what it means to be a patron we always think with an artist that in pictures is the ultimate aim having patrons or dealers but whereas we've sort of touched on various patrons not necessarily dealers today we've found that Constable's relations with those people were always quite fraught and that his life revolved around other people who gave him so much more than just the sort of financial transaction the sending the picture to its ultimate home and so I think in that sense the letters are showing us the light and shade the daily life of what it meant to be an artist and I think I should always remember the sort of parable of Mrs. Treslove one thinks you know how wonderful it is to have a patron how wonderful it is to have a rich person who wants to buy your picture but of course that comes with five years later you're not shot of this woman she's coming back and wanting you to do something else to it and I think the letters reflect that in a wonderful way finally before I finish I'll also just so how grateful I am to Amy for her analysis of the the physical entity of the letter the writing, the folding the pace, the size of the lettering how it occurred to me that I mean like when I used to write a postcard a beautiful postcard to my parents if I was away on holiday you'd use large writing so you didn't have to think of quite so much and Constable obviously paced himself I mean this point has been made so that he could fill that piece of paper there wouldn't be any blanks but also he didn't need to say too much and the other the last little thing I was going to say was again in relation to Constable as the man of feeling that we found through these letters how exceptionally tactical he could be and he's not just simply pouring his mind onto the paper I think when we got that comment to Wordsworth about my dear departed wife he wasn't above playing the sort of sob card several years later when he thought that suited his purpose and so now as I said my head's swimming it's just fascinating to think of him simultaneously working on so many registers and just giving us so much to think about I too want to thank Steven all of Paul Melantine for a fantastic day and to all the speakers and all the questioners as well it's been fantastically stimulating I wanted to just start by pondering a little bit about Beckett Beckett has been kind of the progenitor of all this in many ways but also the bugbear of our collective endeavours today we're all indebted to the patience and the longevity and the tact and the good sense of his edition of Constable's Correspondence I personally just started by dipping in and got completely completely hooked and that there's something about his rather eccentric organisation that makes one think in a different way he doesn't just traipse through the chronology of Constable's life he actually forces us to circle back to see through a relationship and then to come back so it's quite an unusual experience of pistolarity I think and it has great strength it refuses the drag of biography and forces us to look at moments and individual conversations and I think that's absolutely wonderful but it does have its exasperations doesn't it it forces also that sense as you move from one volume or one collection to the next and hold on I've been here before I've been in this room in Charlotte Street moaning about this and that can be frustrating and there are other frustrations that we've talked about provenance of the letters about the sometimes rather mysterious transcription which we're just guessing out because we've not seen the original because we don't know what provenance is and so on and so there are pros and cons I by training I'm a reader through I suspect there are people here who are readers through Beckett and then there are readers Dippers in readers through hands up Dippers in readers through people who are readers through I mean I think it's an entirely different project isn't it whichever way one goes now there is a way in which those two things could be combined and it's called digitization and it would it would enable us to combine the strength of the long way and the micro history and it would also enable us to do something that we've all had to traipse through the hundred volumes to get to which are these patterns of close reading that I'm a bit obsessed by and that have come up again and again sometimes within a paper sometimes across papers rainbows wordsworth science and chromatography is that the word rainbows and ecclesiology and Anglican solemnity searching across the letters only that ability to combine the different volumes that enables extraordinary extraordinarily rich sense of what a rainbow could mean in Constable other terms that have come up Adams come up again there's a religious dimension to quite a lot of this that I just hadn't thought about even though I've read all the profoundly Anglican letters from and Constable there's that sense of the emergence of fascinating patterns that I think we've all benefited from today something that came up in my mind I don't know about you the history of emotions the Lucas letters are not just angry peevish sometimes but they're also I could cry I could cry over and over again I could cry doesn't quite cry but that threat of tears I think would sit very interestingly in the history of emotions and the work of Thomas Dixon on tears and so on and I think there's more we can do with these letters thinking about the performativity of emotions and their role in correspondence I can go on like this forever but genre has come up for me in unexpected and interesting ways we've had scrap books we've had messages that are part of prints and prints that are themselves messages back and forth between Lucas and Constable we've had something that occurred to me never thought about it before letter journals so in the treaslove exchange am I right that both those documents are different kinds of letter journals letters to address to the daughter but also a journal a letter to Maria that's also a journal now as far as I know there's very little work on the letter journal I might know some but it occurs that form occurs in the work of Edward Irving for instance the preacher I think Fanny Campbell I suspect it's quite a familiar late 18th early 19th century form before the penny post and everything changed all that and I think there's a PhD to be written about about the letter journal particularly as it figures different kind of temporality a letter journal different punctuation of space and time all sorts of interesting things and if I have to stop I'll stop at my pet project which I will retire now so hand over willingly which is to think about Constable as a lone father has anything been written about Constable as a lone father and I just I compiled a little bit of data which I won't be able to find now ok so I'm comparing John Constable with another ok so John Constable was born in 1776 my comparator born so 1776 John Constable marries Mariah in 1816 my comparator marries a Mariah in 1812 John Constable has seven children in a very short space of time my comparator has six children in an overlapping but equally short space of time and then we have Mariah Bicknell dying age 40 at 1828 leaving seven children the youngest and infant and my comparator his wife Mariah dies in 1821 age 38 leaving six children the youngest and infant any guesses Patrick Bronte yeah we have two families encountering the same life changing moment when suddenly with all the ants and servants that one can call it still it's a life changing moment and of course my comparison suggests this is not a unique not a rare occurrence in the 19th century lots of men of all classes found themselves to be fathers and I think that's a topic that really with Constable at its centre because we have all this wonderful evidence about all the strategies that he's having to deploy sometimes the children in different households you know four different households at the same time what kind of jabbling even with extended family even with servants it's a massive project and so I do think that there's more work to be done on all that and there you've got it, that's my idea but I think there's so much more that we can do with this correspondence especially as this day has illustrated if we do the close reading the really minute close reading rather than hopping across the text actually thinking about the language the tropes the axioms the styles the monosyllables look at those letters to Lucas sentence after sentence of monosyllables why is it because he's a subservient is it because he's angry is it because he's like a child in some I mean why that when he's capable of instructing his own daughter in several polysyllables do you know avocation, this means this it's your important word, you need to know this so I think there's more we can do but thank you for a very stimulating thought provoking day that's great thank you for that we've got a few minutes if you'd like to talk about anything today can you respond to anything that Trevon Tim said I'll just say something about Beckett is that when Norman Scarfe his collaborator wrote his obituary you wonder why Beckett's there's a lack of emotion in everything and he said he thought about in relation to his years as a judge and a magistrate in India and he said that Beckett's editing is literally magisterial is that everything is being weighed judiciously as if in evidence in a court and Beckett was faced with enormous events, he was present at the massacre of Amritsar and the uprising so it's kind of fascinating to read this, this colonial experience and then think about worthy was full of retired people from the colonial service to think about this the post-war literally post-colonial culture of which Beckett was a part yeah of the people who have seen of the people that have seen the original letters which doesn't include me and compared them to Beckett's book how exact are they, is there any interpretation or because we were talking earlier about the italics for example well Constable's handwriting is largely italic anyway so how, where do those italics come from that's the sort of thing I mean does he he quotes Amritsar underlining but Beckett tends to just put the quotes in and to leave so you miss a lot of the stress actually in the Lucas letters particularly they lose a lot of their form I'm sorry I was just going to say that the underlining is what gets turned into italics when you publish a letter and when his letters were published so I think the whenever we see italics sometimes he does but I think maybe it was just too expensive to publish that but my understanding has always been that when we see italics it's because it's been underlined in the original usually but in terms of line of minor details are they absolutely exact no there are any of this variants I know that Ian Fleming Williams went through quite a few of the letters and he annotated his own copy of the correspondence and he was struck particularly by what he could tell when Beckett would have gotten very tired by the end of the day and certain a certain quality falls off as it were it would be very helpful for someone to go through all of them again with modern technology so that we would know really generally when Beckett italicizes console is underlined there are some double underlinings and triple underlinings triple underlinings which Beckett has difficulty with but there's also the particularly the journal to Mariah was gone through was picked over by Isabel their daughter when before she gave it to the it became public hands and Isabel has found words which she felt she should abort so there are words such as togin the hole which happens to be Constable's favorite supper she thinks togin the hole is not a very good shouldn't really be known so she crosses that out and she crosses out he has a reference to stomach and a reference to peloni and sausage and now most of these Beckett actually holds the paper up and he just writes but he doesn't tend to say that Isabel crosses out so he silently puts them back in there are some which which actually he misses and there's one phrase in one of the general pages that Constable writes to he's missing his wife he says I'm much looking forward to kissing my wife interestingly Isabel has not crossed kissing out probably shouldn't read it tricky handwriting but curiously Beckett misses the word entirely and puts ellipses I'm much looking forward to dot dot dot my wife wow this is fascinating and I must say I have to say when I went through the journals at the Tate I was rather disappointed and he does say I look forward to kissing my wife which is absolutely fine of course but there's some words actually he does nod a bit like Homer and misses a word out which adds one in which is plainly when he writes about about Constable writing when he transcribes Constable Leslie when he's been to to Sheepshanks house in Blackheath I think to look at Sheepshanks collection of turners he he says that some of the paint on on Sheepshanks turners have fallen off and the maid has swept them up into the dust hole quite a well known letter looked at the original there's no word up and what Constable Wright wrote was the maid has swept them into the dust hole now that's simply a mistake perhaps you misread his notes that word doesn't exist but it is put in in Beckett Beckett simply the fact that the way we speak when we say something we say it's swept swept up and so it's a perfectly understandable mistake so although Beckett was probably a genius in doing what he did and by the way the indexes are comparable absolutely wonderful it does need to be looked at again and slowly Thanks very much that's wonderful I think we can continue the conversation later over wine but Mark is going to say a few things it was a really wonderful day I think one of the things just to end that conversation I do think one of the things that we've learnt that this notion of focusing on the individual letter can be so productive that it does give us that opportunity as you were saying Trevor to do that really close reading and once you subject even the shortest and seemingly most straightforward letters to that kind of close reading they are bound with really fascinating interpretive possibilities just as the works themselves do the paintings and the drawings and so on but I want to say again repeat everyone's thanks to all our speakers it's been an amazing day this is probably I think the last conference I'll have helped organise at the Paul Malin Centre no no no I hadn't realised that until now but I think that's true I had to say this has been one of the very very best that I've enjoyed over the last 10 years as director it's been a fantastic day every paper has been full of interest and there's been such we've had an amazing entirely new and original discoveries looking at the mace now your amazing portraits we'll never forget there's some really interesting approaches that have been taken to the work and to the letters by our speakers we've journeyed into the English landscape scenery and sort of went wow it's like a journey into a very dense and difficult but fascinating forest of signs and I look forward to seeing what merges from that but it's been an amazing day I can't tell you how much I've enjoyed it thanks so much especially to Steve because it really has this has really been Steve's idea from the very beginning and I think what we've learned today is that this is a topic both in relation to all the papers that we've had today and that idea of even a selection of papers dealing with individual letters I'm sure we'd love to think about ways in which we might publish some of the papers if not all the papers we've heard today in some form or another through the PMC and I'm sure Steve and I'll be wanting to talk about that it does raise that prospect of how ideal it would be to have a digitised version of the correspondence which of course everyone knows has been a great ambition of mine which I will have to see what I could do in the last few months but even a digitised version of Beckett would be fantastic I think we'd all agree but also I just wanted to say thanks to all the people who have helped organise today our tech team who responded very calmly to a major crisis and packaged one of our projectors with ice apparently to keep it cool for Nick and Rhianne's talks you know really up-to-date methods always work thanks, a huge thanks to Ella Fleming our fantastic events manager for a moment so and actually for discovering and finding a caterers that generated a lunch that I thought was a perfect fusion of old and new melon on the one hand it had all that wonderful warmth and richness of old melon but it also felt very fresh and healthy so I hope that it was a perfect expression of where we are at the moment and thanks also to Danny and to all the rest of the team who've helped out today but can I invite you all now to join us who are here in person thanks all of you watching online but all of you in person I'm not sure if we're going next door or downstairs next door to the anti-room for a drink and a chance to carry on our conversations through till quarter to seven or so thank you so much everyone, very much indeed