PLATE V.--DEDHAM MILL. Victoria and Albert Museum. Painted in 1820, three years after "Flatford Mill." Constable's father was the owner of the watermills at Flatford and Dedham. Many years before the date of this picture, Constable, writing of a landscape of Dedham by an acquaintance, said--"It is very well painted, and there is plenty of light without any light at all." In "Dedham Mill," he progresses in his purpose to infuse true light into his pictures. [Illustration: PLATE V.--DEDHAM MILL.] ====================================================================== Here is a further episode of Constable's youth before he visited London, another example of the luck, there is no other word for it, that attended his art beginnings. The Dowager Lady Beaumont lived at Dedham, where Golding Constable owned a water-mill, and as the families were friendly, Constable early made the acquaintance of her son, Sir George Beaumont, who was twenty-three years his senior. He had already approved of some copies made by the youth in pen and ink after Dorigny's engravings of the cartoons of Raphael, and he had showed him the "Hagar" by Claude, already mentioned, which Sir George always carried about with him when he travelled. What was still more important, he displayed before his protegé thirty water-colours by Girtin. The Claude and the array of Girtins produced an enormous impression upon young Constable. In Claude he made acquaintance with an old master, who had been the first to paint pure landscape in the approved grand or classical manner; in Girtin was revealed to him the harbinger of a new epoch in landscape painting, the young Girtin, friend and fellow-student of Turner, who died in 1802 at the age of twenty-seven, and of whom Turner said--"Had Girtin lived, I should have starved." In 1795 Constable made a tentative visit to London, "for the purpose of ascertaining what might be his chance of success as a painter." He carried with him a letter to Joseph Farrington, pupil of Richard Wilson, who predicted that "his style of landscape would one day form a distinct feature in the art." Constable also made the acquaintance of John Thomas Smith, the engraver, known as "Antiquity Smith," who gave him the following excellent advice, which shows that the revolt against the academic landscape had already begun in England: "Do not," said "Antiquity Smith," "set about inventing figures for a landscape taken from Nature; for you cannot remain an hour in any spot, however solitary, without the appearance of some living thing that will in all probability accord better with the scene and time of day than will any invention of your own."