Constable: A Portrait, by James

colonial invaders brought disease. He also revisits the fact that agriculture caused its early practitioners tremendous problems. There was vulnerability to crop failure, bringing the horrors of famine. Hunter-gatherers ate more than 120 different things, but settled farming reduced people’s diets, with the result that many suffered a fatal lack of vitamins and iron.

That said, being a hunter-gatherer wasn’t much fun. Adherents of the Paleo diet, take note: it wasn’t all rosy. Doig asserts that the Neolithic was by far the worst time to be a human, with deadly infections and violence never far off. Archaeological records show violent death rates of up to 60 per cent.

Only the Aztecs had a worse time of it, fighting ‘so-called Flower Wars that were arranged in advance with neighbouring states, rather as we might arrange sporting fixtures’. Life at home wasn’t much safer, with people’s ‘hearts being cut out on top of pyramids on a staggering scale’.

It’s a relief to reach the sunlit uplands of the present day, where we’re more likely to die as a result of eating too many chips and sitting too long on the sofa. Thanks to the wonders of modern medicine – and hygiene – we are fated to die from diseases associated with longer life spans: the familiar triumvirate of heart disease, cancer and stroke. The older we get, the higher the odds of our developing dementia and type 2 diabetes. This is the price we pay for our unprecedented life expectancy.

The actual process of death is not dwelt upon at great length here. For the nuts and bolts of how a body shuts down, Sherwin Nuland’s How We Die cannot be bettered, while amateur oncologists will relish Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies.

A more serious lack, though, is cultural context. Doig does provide some detail about the Black Death. He describes how households where a plague death had taken place were compulsorily shuttered up, their terrified inhabitants trapped inside. The bodies were wheeled through the streets, preceded by a sombre figure with a loud bell. But there’s little else here about death customs and nothing at all about death rituals.

Dying itself is less fascinating than what we have thought about it, over recorded time. Death ritual shows us the grandiosity, futility and desperate hope that it may not, after all, be the end of us. That’s why it’s so astonishing and so moving to learn that Neanderthals buried their dead with flowers.

Take a child to a museum and they’ll be agog at the mummies, but tell them someone died from complications arising from osteoarthritis and you’ve lost their attention.

The adult reader may feel something similar here. In Constable country

LUCY LETHBRIDGE Constable: A Portrait By James Hamilton Weidenfeld & Nicolson £25

In 1823, John Constable presented to his friend John Fisher, the Bishop of Salisbury, his lovely oil painting Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s Grounds. Fisher objected only to the looming grey clouds.

But what is a Constable without clouds? He is the pre-eminent artist of the English sky in all its tumultuous variations, an obsessively close observer of ever-changing weather.

Constable’s The Hay Wain, so familiar from a million reproductions that it is difficult to see it with a fresh eye, first went under the title Landscape: Noon. That is far more evocative of its feeling of midday stillness, before the sudden breaking of the rain-cloud.

Following his wonderful biography of the roistering Gainsborough, James Hamilton’s Constable is another tour-deforce of historical imagination. He embeds Constable so deeply in his period, his place and the circle of his friends and acquaintances, that all the artist’s many contradictions make complete sense within his life’s whole.

He is helped by the fact that Constable was a prodigious and vivid correspondent. His writing is a joy. It flows out of him in an unstoppable flood. We learn about his voracious reading, dogged determination, emotional response to nature, scabrous views on fellow artists and paranoia. He exposes the internecine rivalries of the early19th-century Academicians: ‘the field of Waterloo is a field of mercy [compared with] ours’. We learn too about his self-absorption and hypochondria, his love for his wife Maria and their seven children. ‘Bottled wasps upon a southern wall’ is his description of their huggermugger family life.

Constable couldn’t have been further from the swooning, decadent artist of the Romantic imagination – all his radicalism went into his painting. He is long on self-regard and short on self-awareness but an alluring, if opinionated, companion.

Constable inherited his letter-writing skill from his mother, Ann Constable, who also had a talent for the ‘colourful, incidental detail’. The Constables were prosperous Suffolk people with roots deep in the Stour valley. His father, Golding, owned the Flatford Mill that his son made famous. They lived in a handsome house in East Bergholt. If not quite squires, they were people of substance, with a pew in the village church.

John was handsome, gifted and loved: it is one of the many delights of Hamilton’s book that we enter the encircling group of encouragers who supported him. Time and again, he lands in the middle of an interesting crowd – and has the intuition to seek out engaging, curious, inquisitive types.

An uncle was a brewer but also a dedicated amateur botanist and fellow of the Linnean Society. John Fisher was a ‘sociable smoothie’, who oiled the wheels with introductions and stimulating conversation.

From the diaries of the artist Joseph Farington, we learn how the young Constable knocked on the door and wouldn’t be rebuffed. Another uncle paid for him to go to the Lake District, where he met Wordsworth.

Hamilton has a particular affection for John Dunthorne, who lived in East Bergholt. Dunthorne did a bit of everything – plastering, building and fixing up – and he had an unconventional and capacious intellect. He was an autodidact fascinated by ideas of all sorts. He could make musical instruments and loved to paint. Hamilton calls his infectious company ‘the wealthy openness of the untaught mind’.

It was he who encouraged the young Constable to pay attention to nature, to what was present in his own stretch of landscape. They spent hours outside with their easels, looking and painting. Constable’s marriage (after an