FLATFORD MILL, ON THE RIVER STOUR. FROM A PAINTING BY JOHN CONSTABLE, NOW IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON.
This picture was given to the National Gallery by the painter's children. It is possibly one of three pictures on which Constable obtained the gold medal of the Paris Salon in 1822—the one which in the Salon catalogue is entitled "A Canal." The other two were "The Hay-Wain" (shown on the next page) and "Hampstead Heath," both now in the National Gallery.
This was henceforth the aim of his life; and from constant study out of doors he learned that natural objects exist to our sight not isolated, but in relation one to another; that the whole is more important than a part; and that the bark of a tree, a minutely defined plant, or a conscientiously geologically studied rock, may mar the effect of a whole picture, while the scene to be represented has a character of its own more subtle, more evanescent, but also infinitely more true than any single element of which it is composed. More than that, through living on such intimate terms with Mother Nature, he learned to value the smiles of her sunshine, and to cunningly adjust her cloud-veils when she frowned. His object was no longer that of the earlier painters, who—and along with others even faithful Crome—had aimed to paint a "view" for its topographical value, suppressing or altering, like mediocre portrait painters, any feature which was thought to be displeasing. Constable painted the moods of nature; the simplest subjects seen under ever-varying effects of light were his choice; and though his pictures bear the names of various places, and divers existing features of these places are portrayed, it is always the beauty of the scene, or that of the moment of the day or night, which affects the spectator.
THE HAY-WAIN. FROM A PAINTING BY JOHN CONSTABLE, NOW IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON.
This picture was first exhibited in the Royal Academy of 1821. It is also one of three exhibited by Constable in the Paris Salon the following year. It is one of Constable's best known pictures. The thoroughly English character of the scene, painted with truth and simplicity, makes it, after a lapse of seventy-five years, as modern as though it were painted yesterday.
By a public which was used to the conventional tones of the older painters, and which understood or was interested in Turner's daring variations on the theme of classical landscape, these fresh, simple pictures which to-day look so natural to us were regarded with distrust. Not even the shepherd, much less the warrior or the demigod, inhabited these quiet scenes. A picture which any rural gentleman could see from his front door, smacked too little of art for the modish town. Moreover, Constable, no doubt sighing for something lighter and more brilliant, was accustomed, in a vain effort to rival the clear light of out-of-doors, to use the lightest colors of his palette. On a varnishing day at the Royal Academy, the word was passed around among the astonished painters that in portions of his picture of the year Constable had actually used pure white!
In 1829, however, the world moving, Constable was elected to membership in the Royal Academy. The most notable triumph of his life, though, befell seven years earlier, in 1822, when he sent three pictures to be exhibited in the Salon in Paris. The Hay-Wain, and Hampstead Heath, both at present in the National Gallery, London, were of the three, and excited the greatest enthusiasm among the group of young painters who, with Delacroix at their head, were warring against the academic rule imposed by David. Constable's work thenceforward was the dominant influence in France, and from it can be directly traced the great group of landscape painters which we to-day miscall the "Barbizon" school.
It is pleasant to recall that official honor—the first which he received—came to Constable by the award of the great gold medal of the Salon at this time. For a number of years after this he sent his work to the successive Salons. Pecuniary success, such as fell to the lot of Turner, was never his; the first painter who looked at nature in the open air "through his temperament," as Zola aptly expresses it, was perforce contented to live a modest life at Hampstead, happy in his work, grateful to nature who disclosed so many of her secrets to him.