ers--with the same happy
accompaniments of rustic incidents, occupations, or amusements--did
Constable's predecessor, Gainsborough, find his academy.

Very early in Constable's career, he adopted the principle which regulated
through life the character of his painting. "There is room enough," he
writes, after considering the Exhibition of 1802--"_There is room enough
for a natural painter_. The great vice of the present day is bravura--an
attempt to do something beyond the truth. Fashion always had, and always
will have, its day; but truth in all things only will last, and can only
have just claims on posterity." Here, indeed, he felt, and justly, that
there was an opening for him in the school of English landscape.
Gainsborough, who had first communicated truth and life to the treatment
of the genuine scenery of England, was no more. It is true, the grosser
absurdities of the Smiths of Chichester, and the other compounders of
landscapes _secundum artem_, with which we are familiar in the engravings
of Woollet, in whose performances a kind of pictorial millennium appears
to be realized; where the English cottage stands side by side with the
Italian villa, and Norfolk bumpkins are seen making love to Arcadian
shepherdesses knitting beneath the pillars of a Doric temple--these
noxious grafts of a conventional taste upon the healthy stem of our native
landscape-painting had disappeared. But still, the influence of this
conventional taste in a great measure remained--shown in the established
belief that _subject_ made the picture, and necessitating, as was
supposed, the exclusive adoption of certain established modes of
composition, colouring, and treatment, from which the hardy
experimentalist who should first attempt to deviate was sure, for a time
at least, to encounter opposition; or, what was more probable, entire
neglect.

"In art," says Constable, writing in 1829, "there are two modes by which
men aim at distinction. In the one, by a careful application to what
others have accomplished, the artist imitates their works, or selects and
combines their various beauties; in the other, he seeks excellence at its
primitive source, nature. In the first, he forms a style upon the study of
pictures, and produces either imitation or eclectic art; in the second, by
a close observation of nature, he discovers qualities existing in her
which have never been portrayed before, and thus forms a style which is
original. The results o