“The Eye it Cannot Choose but See”: Dorothy Wordsworth, John Constable, and the Plein-Air Sketch

Abstract

The paper aims to advance the scholarship on Dorothy Wordsworth (1771–1855) with a study that situates her writing in its art historical context. While critics often acknowledge her extraordinary visual perceptiveness, none has examined her descriptive landscape prose in relation to turn-of-the-century developments in landscape painting. Dorothy's The Alfoxden Journal (1798) and The Grasmere Journals (1800–3) coincide with the intensification of sketching the landscape en plein air (c. 1800) among painters in Britain and Europe. Specifically, I discuss these two journals in relation to sketches by John Constable, the most committed and sustained practitioner of plein-airpainting in early nineteenth-century England. Natural effects that Dorothy describes in the Alfoxden and Grasmere journals closely resemble features that Constable was simultaneously depicting in the open air: natural light observed at specific times of day; a broad and vivid range of colours; and fluctuating atmospheric and weather conditions. Similarities between Dorothy's prose and Constable's sketches not only reflect their shared engagement in the aesthetic turn towards naturalism during this period, when direct observation of nature's widely varied and transient features was replacing classically derived principles of ideal form and compositional order characteristic of landscape art in the eighteenth century, but also reveal the deliberateness with which Dorothy sought to replicate in her writing the intensity of observation and particularity of description that she admired in visual art.