Constable had a happy, uneventful life and a quiet death. A happy life? Yes. For the loss of friends and the depression of spirits that clouded his closing years are events that happen to not a few who have lived the major portion of their lives pleasantly and successfully. Practical, level-headed, industrious, there is no hint of the aberrations or eccentricities of genius in the orderly and fruitful sixty-one years of his existence, which began in 1776, and ended in 1837. Probably the severest blow in his life was the death of his wife in 1828, leaving him with seven children. It came, almost without warning, the year after the family had settled so contentedly in Well Walk, Hampstead. "This house," he wrote, "is to my wife's heart's content; it is situated on an eminence at the back of the spot in which you saw us, and our little drawing-room commands a view unsurpassed in Europe, from Westminster Abbey to Gravesend. The dome of St Paul's in the air seems to realise Michael Angelo's words on seeing the Pantheon; 'I will build such a thing in the sky.'" After his wife's death Constable returned to his former residence in Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square; but he retained Well Walk, and often sojourned there. ====================================================================== PLATE IV.--FLATFORD MILL ON THE RIVER STOUR. National Gallery. Painted in 1817. Constable was then forty-one, a somewhat mature age for a man to produce what may fairly be called his first important work. It is a picture of England--ripe, lush, carefully composed, carefully executed, but fresh as are the meadows on the banks of the Stour; and the sky, across which the large clouds are drifting, is sunny. [Illustration: PLATE IV.--FLATFORD MILL ON THE RIVER STOUR.] ====================================================================== Probably the greatest surprise, and certainly one of the most comforting episodes of his life, was the receipt of a legacy of twenty thousand pounds on the death of his wife's father, which elicited the remark that now he could "stand before a six-foot canvas with a mind at ease, thank God!" Constable developed slowly as a painter, but having once found himself he strode steadily onward, knowing exactly what he meant to do, turning neither to the right nor to the left, indifferent to tradition, schools, and influences. Consequently the earlier years of his life, when he was breaking away from tradition and beginning to see things with his own eyes are the more interesting. He was born at East Bergholt in Suffolk on 11th June 1776, the second son of Golding Constable, owner of water and wind mills. At the Dedham Grammar School he was renowned for his penmanship, and before he left school, at seventeen years of age, he had already shown a strong inclination towards painting. In this he was encouraged by his friend John Dunthorne, plumber and glazier, a man of parts, who devoted his leisure time to landscape painting.