onventional
type of picture instead of that directly inspired by nature; and
this artificial standard, which diverted figure painting from its
legitimate field, bore even more heavily on the art of landscape
painting.

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.

[Illustration: 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 questio