The first who applied these principles to oil-painting was John Constable, one of the greatest pioneers in his own province and one of the most powerful individualities of the century.

East Bergholt, the pretty little village where Constable’s cradle stood, is fourteen miles distant from Sudbury, the birthplace of Gainsborough. Here he was born on 11th June 1776, at the very time when Gainsborough settled in London. His father was a miller, a well-to-do man, who had three windmills in Bergholt. The other famous miller’s son in the history of art is Rembrandt. At first a superior career was chosen for him; it was intended that he should become a clergyman. But he felt more at home in the mill than in the schoolroom, and became a miller like his fathers before him. Observation of the changes of the sky is an essential part of a miller’s calling, and this occupation of his youth seems to have been not without influence on the future artist; no one before him had observed the sky with the same attention.

CONSTABLE.COTTAGE IN A CORNFIELD.

A certain Dunthorne, an eccentric personage to whom the boy often came, gave him—always in the open air—his first instruction; and another of his patrons, Sir George Beaumont, as an æsthetically trained connoisseur, criticised what he painted. When Constable showed him a study he asked: “Where do you mean to place your brown tree?” For the first law in his æsthetics was this: a good painting must have the colour of a good fiddle; it must be brown. Sojourn in London was without influence on Constable. He was twenty-three years of age, a handsome young fellow with dark eyes and a fine expressive countenance, when, in 1799, he wrote to his teacher Dunthorne: “I am this morning admitted a student at the Royal Academy; the figure which I drew for admittance was the Torso. I am now comfortably settled in Cecil Street, Strand, No. 23.” He was known to the London girls as “the handsome young miller of Bergholt.” He undertook the most varied things, copied pictures of Reynolds, and painted an altar-piece, “Christ blessing Little Children,” which was admired by no one except his mother. In addition he studied Ruysdael, whose works made a great impression on him, in the National Gallery. In 1802 he appears for the first time in the Catalogue of the Royal Academy as the exhibitor of a landscape, and from this time to the year of his death, 1837, he was annually represented there, contributing altogether one hundred and four pictures. In the earliest—windmills and village parties—every detail is carefully executed; every branch is painted on the trees, and every tile on the houses; but as yet one can breathe no air in these pictures and see no sunshine.

But he writes, in 1803, a very important letter to his old friend Dunthorne. “For the last two years,” he says, “I have been running after pictures, and seeking the truth at second-hand. I have not endeavoured to represent nature with the same elevation of mind with which I set out, but have rather tried to make my performance look like the work of other men. I am come to a determination to make no idle visits this summer, nor to give up my time to commonplace people. I shall return to Bergholt, where I shall endeavour to get a pure and unaffected manner of representing the scenes that may employ me. There is little or nothing in the exhibition worth looking up to. There is room enough for a natural painter.” He left London accordingly, and worked, in 1804, the whole summer “quite alone among the oaks and solitudes of Helmingham Park. I have taken quiet possession of the parsonage, finding it empty. A woman comes from the farmhouse, where I eat, and makes my bed, and I am left at liberty to wander where I please during the day.” And having now returned to the country he became himself again. “Painting,” he writes, “is with me but another word for feeling; and I associate ‘my careless boyhood’ with all that lies upon the banks of the Stour; those scenes made me a painter, and I am grateful.” He had passed his whole youth amid the lovely valleys and luxuriant meadows of Bergholt, where the flocks were at pasture and the beetles hummed; he had wandered about the soft banks of the Stour, in the green woods of Suffolk, amongst old country-houses and churches, farms and picturesque cottages. This landscape which he had loved as a boy he also painted. He was the painter of cultivated English landscape, the portrayer of country life, of canals and boats, of windmills and manor-houses. He had a liking for all simple nature which reveals everywhere the traces of human activity—for arable fields and villages, orchards and cornfields. A strip of meadow, a watergate with a few briars, a clump of branching, fibrous trees, were enough to fill him with ideas and feelings. Gainsborough had already painted the like; but Constable denotes an advance beyond Gainsborough as beyond Crome. Intimate in feeling as Gainsborough undoubtedly was, he had a tendency to beautify the objects of nature; he selected and gave them a delicacy of arrangement and a grace of line which in reality they did not possess. Constable was the first to renounce every species of adaptation and arbitrary arrangement in composition. His boldness in the rendering of personal impressions raises him above Crome. Crome gets his effect principally by his accuracy: he represented what he saw; Constable showed how he saw the thing. While the former, following Hobbema, has an air reminiscent of galleries and old masters, Constable saw the world with his own eyes, and was the first entirely independent modern landscape painter. In his young days he had made copies after Claude, Rubens, Reynolds, Ruysdael, Teniers, and Wilson, which might have been mistaken for the originals, but later he had learnt much from Girtin’s water-colour paintings. From that time he felt that he was strong enough to trust his own eyes. He threw to the winds all that had hitherto been considered as the chief element of beauty, and gave up the rounding of his pictures for pictorial effect; cut trees right through the middle to get into his picture just what interested him, and no more.

S. Low & Co.
CONSTABLE.THE VALLEY FARM.

S. Low & Co.
COX.CROSSING THE SANDS.

He set himself right in the midst of verdure; the nightingales sang, the leaves murmured, the meadows grew green, and the clouds gleamed. In the fifteenth-century art there were the graceful spring trees of Perugino; in the seventeenth, the bright spring days of those two Flemings Jan Silberecht and Lucas Uden; in the nineteenth, Constable became the first painter of spring. If Sir George Beaumont now asked him where he meant to put his brown tree, he answered: “Nowhere, because I don’t paint brown trees any more.” He saw that foliage is green in summer, and—painted it so; he saw that summer rain and morning dew makes the verdure more than usually intense, and—he painted what he saw. He noticed that green leaves sparkle, gleam, and glitter in the sun—and painted them accordingly; he saw that the light, when it falls upon bright-looking walls, dazzles like snow in the sunshine—and painted it accordingly. There was a good deal of jeering at the time about “Constable’s snow,” and yet it was not merely all succeeding English artists who continued to put their faith in this painting of light, but the masters of Barbizon too, and Manet afterwards.