Crome, by his isolation at Norwich, escaped this tendency. The Norwich painters, however, were, to a certain degree, an accident. In the London of their time, the almost total cessation of intercourse with continental Europe, due to the war with France, had not prevented the academical standard from penetrating and taking root. The independence of Hogarth in the preceding century had been without result; and Sir Joshua Reynolds, in principle if not always in practice, had preached the doctrine of submission to accepted formulas. Benjamin West, who had succeeded him as president of the Royal Academy, was little but an academic formula himself; and landscape (whose greatest representative had been, until his death in 1782, Richard Wilson, a painter of merit, who had united to a charming sense of color an adherence to the strictest classical influence) was wallowing in the mire of conventionality.
THE PARSON'S DAUGHTER. FROM A PAINTING BY GEORGE ROMNEY IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON.
This portrait, from an unknown model, gives Romney with all his charm and more than his usual sincerity.
To the London of 1800, however, were to be given two landscape painters who may fairly claim the honor of placing their art on a higher pinnacle than it had ever before reached. One of them, John Constable, remains to-day the direct source from which all representation of the free open air is derived, be the painter Saxon, Gallic, or Teuton. The other, Joseph Mallord William Turner, may be said to reach greater heights than his contemporary; but, unlike him, his art is so based on qualities peculiar to himself that he stands alone, though having many imitators who have never achieved more than a superficial resemblance to his work.
Constable, founding his work on nature with close observance of natural laws, was able to exert an influence by which all painters have since profited. When he came to London, at the age of twenty-three, to study in the school of the Royal Academy, he attracted the attention of Sir George Beaumont, an amateur painter who, by his taste and social position, was all-powerful in the artistic circles of the metropolis. It was he who asked the young painter the famous question, "Where do you place your brown tree?" this freak of vegetation being one of the essential component parts of the properly constructed academical landscape of the period. For a year or two the youth placed brown trees, submissively enough, in landscapes painfully precise in detail and deficient in atmosphere. Then he did that which to a common, sensible mind would seem the most obvious thing for a landscape painter to do, but which had been done so rarely that the simple act was the boldest of innovations. He took his colors out of doors, and painted from nature.
JOHN CONSTABLE. FROM AN ENGRAVING BY LUCAS, AFTER A PORTRAIT BY C.E. LESLIE.
Reproduced, by the courtesy of W.H. Fuller, from "Memoirs of the Life of John Constable, Esq., R.A., Composed Chiefly of his Letters, by C.R. Leslie, R.A." Quarto, London, 1843. This noble memoir, which makes one love the man as one admires the painter, is unfortunately out of print.
Of the dreary waste of "historical" and arbitrarily composed landscapes, even in the simpler honest productions of the Dutch preceding this century, nearly all were painted from drawings; color had been applied according to recipe; the brown tree was rampant through all the seasons represented, from primavernal spring to golden autumn. At the most, only studies in colors were made out of doors—unrelated portions of pictures, stained rather than painted, with timid desire to enregister details. These were then transported to the studio, where they underwent a process of arrangement, of "cookery," as the typically just French expression puts it; from which the picture came out steeped in a "brown sauce," conventional, artificial, and monotonous, but pleasing to the Academy-ridden public of the time. The young "miller of Bergholt"—for it was there in the county of Suffolk that young Constable first saw the light, on June 11, 1776—determined in 1803 to have done with convention. He writes to a friend, one Dunthorne, who had had much influence on his early life and was his first teacher: "For the last two years I have been running after pictures and seeking truth at second hand;" adding that he would hereafter study nature alone, convinced that "there is [was] room enough for a natural painter."