"Dedham Mill" may look to our spoilt modern eyes a little tame, but detach yourself from the present, drift into harmony with the picture, and you may perhaps invoke the spirit of the dead man who saw temperate beauty in this scene of his boyhood, and who tried to state his love and gratitude laboriously with paint and brushes—poor tools to express the living light and life of Nature.
Two years later, in 1821, at the age of forty-five, he painted "The Hay Wain," to which I have referred at length in the opening chapter. Perhaps some day when the re-organisation of the National Collections is complete, it will be found possible to hang the brilliant full-sized sketch of "The Hay Wain" now at South Kensington alongside the finished picture in the National Gallery. In the rough magnificent sketch you will observe that he had already begun to use the palette-knife freely in putting on the colour, a practice to which he became more and more addicted.
PLATE VIII.—SALISBURY.
National Gallery.
A preliminary study, without the rainbow, for the large picture of "Salisbury from the Meadows," exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1831. It is larger than his usual sketches, but shows no anxiety. The hand following the eye stopped when the vision of the eye was recorded, when all the hurry of the wet glitter of the scene had been stated in broken pigment.
