236 TREES IN NATURE, MYTH & ART 



upon the leaves. This sparkle was known to 

 his contemporaries as "Constable's snow"; 

 which suggests, either that the effect was not 

 well rendered, or that those who thus named 

 it had not observed the effect in nature — prob- 

 ably the latter. This is the ''flickering, glisten- 

 ing, restless light " of Ruskin's depreciation. 

 Redgrave says that "it is told of Chantrey — 

 who, as having begun art as a landscape 

 painter, ought to have had some sense of 

 nature — that he took the brush out of our 

 painter's hands on one of the varnishing days, 

 and as poor Constable said, 'brushed away 

 all his dew ' ; passed a dirty brown glaze over 

 all his truthful sparkle, to tone it down to the 

 dull hue of conventional truth ". 



Just one other point before we leave Con- 

 stable. Redgrave refers to the "commence- 

 ments " that he used to make for his pictures, 

 sometimes of the same size as the completed 

 pictures, which he worked broadly, with very 

 little detail, and which, as soon as he was satis- 

 fied with the indications they contained, he 

 abandoned, and began again on a new canvas, 

 "endeavouring to retain the fine qualities of 

 the studied sketch, adding to it such an amount 



