Constable has now his assured high place in British art. So valuable have his paintings become, that he has long been a prey to the forger and the clever copyist. Mr C. J. Holmes, in his exhaustive and discriminating work on Constable, devotes four pages to an examination of the methods of the forgers. In another appendix he prints a chronological list of Constable's chief pictures and sketches, from 1795, the year of his earliest dated work, "A Study after Claude," to the "Arundel Mill and Castle," exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1837. At the beginning of the record of each year's work there is a line giving the "Places Visited" by Constable during the year. These bare records are like so many windows opening to the country places which Constable loved, where he spent joyous, enthusiastic days; for Constable was never so happy as when he stood with brushes and palette face to face with Nature. Turner was a world traveller--the world of Europe. Constable was a home traveller--the homely stiles, stumps, and lanes of the village. What a vista the following mere record of the Places Visited in 1823 gives: London, Southgate, Suffolk, Salisbury, Gillingham, Sherbourne, Fonthill, Cole-Orton. Can you not see him drawing from each place fresh and dewy inspiration? Not "truth at second-hand": truth direct from the source. And does not the heart respond to Constable's generous enthusiasm for his great contemporary. Here is his testimony to Turner's contributions to the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1828: "Turner has some golden visions, glorious and beautiful. They are only visions, but still, they are art, and one could live and die with such pictures." ====================================================================== PLATE VI.--A COUNTRY LANE. National Gallery. This sketch probably served as the motive for the picture of "The Cornfield." The sobriety of the work places it in a category between the careful construction of the Exhibition pictures and the impetuosity of most of the sketches. [Illustration: PLATE VI.--A COUNTRY LANE.] ====================================================================== CHAPTER IV HIS SKETCHES Constable exhibited one hundred and four works at the Royal Academy. In addition to these and other paintings, he produced many brilliant sketches and a number of drawings. Like Turner, his achievements may be exhaustively studied in public Exhibitions in London, and as with Turner, the difficulty is where to begin. At the National Gallery there is a wall composed, with one exception, entirely of his works; the Victoria and Albert Museum contains a room, or rather a hall of his pictures, sketches, and studies, and he is also represented at the Tate and Diploma Galleries. Some of the examples were bequeathed to the nation by his last surviving daughter, Miss Isabel Constable, in 1888. Two years later Henry Vaughan bequeathed a number of works, including "The Hay Wain."