That visit to London "for the purpose of ascertaining what might be his chance of success as a painter," would seem to have been encouraging neither to himself nor to his parents. No immediate answer was forthcoming, and while the decision was in abeyance his time was divided between London and Bergholt. It is on record that he worked hard: that he studied Leonardo's _Treatise on Painting_; that he read Hessner's _Essay on Landscape_; and that he painted two pictures--"A Chymist" and "An Alchymist"--of very little merit. Gradually it seems to have been recognised that he was to become not a painter, but a clerk in his father's counting-house. In 1797, at the age of twenty-one, young Constable wrote to "Antiquity Smith": "I must now take your advice and attend to my father's business ... now I see plainly it will be my lot to walk through life in a path contrary to that in which my inclination would lead me." Poor John! Not even a peep of the skies from the windmill, merely a stool in the counting-house. This threat of the counting-house stool seems to have been only a temporary menace. His biographer dwells very briefly on those dark disillusioned days. Suddenly the clouds lift, and in 1799 we find him admitted a student of the Royal Academy Schools. His biographer breaks the news dramatically, with the statement--"in the year 1799 he had resumed the pencil, not again to lay it aside." No record is given of the period he presumably passed in his father's counting-house. We know only that at twenty-three years of age he attained his heart's desire. The following passage from a letter written to Dunthorne, on 4th February 1799, inaugurates Constable's career as a painter: "I am now comfortably settled in Cecil Street, Strand, Number twenty-three. I shall begin painting as soon as I have the loan of a sweet little picture by Jacob Ruysdael to copy." No doubt he learned much from copying Ruysdael and other masters, but Nature was his real tutor. Later in the year he writes from Ipswich: "It is a most delightful country for a painter. I fancy I see Gainsborough in every hedge and hollow tree." And in 1802 he makes that memorable communication by letter to Dunthorne after a visit to Sir George Beaumont's pictures, to which reference has already been made. "For the last two years I have been running after pictures, and seeking the truth at second hand ... I shall return to Bergholt, where I shall endeavour to get a pure and unaffected manner of representing the scenes that may employ me ... _There is room for a natural painter_. The great vice of the day is _bravura_, an attempt to do something beyond the truth."