enes. 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.

[Illustration: THE "FIGHTING TEMERAIRE" TUGGED TO HER LAST BERTH. FROM
A PAINTING BY J.M.W. TURNER.

The "Fighting Temeraire" was a line-of-battle ship of ninety-eight
guns which Lord Nelson captured from the French at the battle of the
Nile, August 1, 1798. In the battle of Trafalgar, October 21, 1805,
she fought next to the "Victory"--the ship from which Nelson commanded
the battle, and aboard which, in the course of it, he was killed. She
was sold out of the service in 1838, and towed to Rotherhithe to be
broken up. Turner's painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy
of 1839. His picture touched the popular heart, and though no
reproduction in black and white can approach the splendor of c