114 THE ESSEX FIELD CLUB. 



English Landscape, which summarises the secrets which he had wrested from his 

 art by his life's labour. In the frontispiece of this work is a representation of 

 the house at Bergholt where he was born (now pulled down). His death, which 

 occurred in London suddenly, March 30, 1837, was undoubtedly the result of his 

 constitution being thoroughly undermined by the intense application with which 

 he pursued his labours. 



" His principal pictures are too well known to need much comment, and I will 

 only refer to one or two of his local ones. The Locks of the neighbourhood were, 

 of course, favourite subjects of his brush. His ' Scene on the Stour,' was 

 exhibited at the Academy in 18 19. It i; now known as the White Horse, from a 

 white horse in a barge in the foreground. ' Stratford Mill,' Academy 1820 ; 

 ' D^dham Vale,' 1811. These two pictures realised lOO guineas each, and here I 

 may mention, by way of contrast, that on June 3rd, this year, his ' Hampstead 

 Heath' fetched 2,550 guineas at the sale of Lord Rcvelstoke's pictures. 'The 

 Ha3'wain,' painted in 1821, was a scene at Flatford. This picttire introduced 

 Constable to France. It was bought by a Frenchman, and Constable was 

 encouraged to visit Paris, where he was met with enthusiasm and great distinc- 

 tion at the Louvre Exhibitions. The 'Jumping Horse' was a picture well 

 illustrating the nimble way in which the barge horses surmount the little barriers 

 which do duty for gates on the towing-path. The famous ' Valley Farm ' was 

 painted in 1834. The house is called ' Willy Lett's house,' after an eccentric 

 occupier, who, so it is said, for 80 years never left his house for four days. This 

 picture is in the National Gallery, and also his local paintings, the ' Country 

 Lane,' ' The Cornfield,' and 'The Haywain.' A large number of his other 

 sketches have recently been added to the National Collection. 



" Having dealt thus very cursorily with Constable's place in the history of his 

 time, I should like to add a few words on his place in the history of art. ' I 

 love,' he said, ' every stile, every stump, and lane in the village ; as long as I am 

 able to hold my brush I shall never cease to paint them.' It is true he altered 

 the composition of his scenes so that it is impossible, sometimes, to identify them 

 now, but, in another sense, he was Nature's most faithful slave, and as such the 

 Field Club should especially honour his memory. This is best illustrated by 

 realising the parallel between his work as an artist and that of Wordsworth and the 

 Lake School as poets. The eighteenth century was a period of abnormal artificial- 

 ness. In poetry there were certain forms of diction considered orthodox, and all 

 outside this prescribed pale was not recognised as elegant, even though it might 

 be true. Just as Wordsworth and his school of poets broke this literary conven- 

 tionality and burst the bubble of diction, so Constable was the pioneer 

 in exterminating a similar spirit of artificial conventionality in eighteenth 

 century art. Among the art canons of his time were such rid'culous 

 ideas as that ' A good picture, like a good fiddle, must be brown,' that 

 every landscape must have its ' brown tree,' and that the merits of painting 

 largely depended upon where the essential brown tree was placed. Constable 

 went boldly in defiance of these autocratic decrees of fashion, confident that 

 sooner or later truth to nature would triumph over the canons of bad taste. It 

 may seem hard that for a great part of his life prejudice was too strong for his 

 gospel to be generally accepted, but on the other hand it is a grand victory for 

 his cause that within a century the genuine has superseded almost all the dictums 

 and canons of an absurd period in art. The danger would appear now to be that 

 painters, failing to appreciate Constable's mission, and yet recognising the 



