n, "Where do you place your brown tree?"
this freak of vegetation being one of the essential component parts
of the properly constructed academical landscape of the period. For
a year or two the youth placed brown trees, submissively enough, in
landscapes painfully precise in detail and deficient in atmosphere.
Then he did that which to a common, sensible mind would seem the most
obvious thing for a landscape painter to do, but which had been done
so rarely that the simple act was the boldest of innovations. He took
his colors out of doors, and painted from nature.

[Illustration: JOHN CONSTABLE. FROM AN ENGRAVING BY LUCAS, AFTER A
PORTRAIT BY C.E. LESLIE

Reproduced, by the courtesy of W.H. Fuller, from "Memoirs of the Life
of John Constable, Esq., R.A., Composed Chiefly of his Letters, by
C.R. Leslie, R.A." Quarto, London, 1843. This noble memoir, which
makes one love the man as one admires the painter, is unfortunately
out of print.]

Of the dreary waste of "historical" and arbitrarily composed
landscapes, even in the simpler honest productions of the Dutch
preceding this century, nearly all were painted from drawings; color
had been applied according to recipe; the brown tree was rampant
through all the seasons represented, from primavernal spring to
golden autumn. At the most, only studies in colors were made out of
doors--unrelated portions of pictures, stained rather than painted,
with timid desire to enregister details. These were then transported
to the studio, where they underwent a process of arrangement, of
"cookery," as the typically just French expression puts it; from
which the picture came out steeped in a "brown sauce," conventional,
artificial, and monotonous, but pleasing to the Academy-ridden public
of the time. The young "miller of Bergholt"--for it was there in the
county of Suffolk that young Constable first saw the light, on June
11, 1776--determined in 1803 to have done with convention. He writes
to a friend, one Dunthorne, who had had much influence on his early
life and was his first teacher: "For the last two years I have been
running after pictures and seeking truth at second hand;" adding that
he would hereafter study nature alone, convinced that "there is [was]
room enough for a natural painter."

[Illustration: FLATFORD MILL, ON THE RIVER STOUR. FROM A PAINTING BY
JOHN CONSTABLE, NOW IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON.

This picture was given to the National Gallery by the painter's
c