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 1819. It is now known as the White Horse, from a
white horse in a barge in the foreground. 'Stratford Mill,' Academy 1820 ;
'Dedham Vale,' 1811. These two pictures realised 100 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 Revelstoke's pictures. 'The
Haywain,' painted in 1821, was a scene at Flatford. This picture 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 Lott'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 ridiculous
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