"The Leaping Horse" of 1825, to which reference has already been made, called by some his "grandest painting," reposes in the Diploma Gallery at Burlington House. Several changes were made in the picture after its exhibition at the Royal Academy, which the curious can verify by a study of the full-sized sketch at South Kensington. From this year onward the movement of Nature and the brilliancy of objects in sunlight intrigued him more and more, although his passion for light never reached the white-hot fervour of Turner in his latter years. For Turner the sunrise, a world almost too beautiful and evanescent to be real; for Constable the noonday glow, the still heat haze, seen between cool, dark trees, hovering over a field of ripe corn, as in "The Cornfield," painted when he was fifty--a typical Constable. Constable was pleased with "The Cornfield." Writing of it to Fisher he said: "It is not neglected in any part; the trees are more than usually studied, well defined as well as the stems; they are shaken by a pleasant and healthful breeze at noon 'While now a fresher gale Sweeping with shadowy gusts the fields of corn....'" This picture, perhaps the best known and most popular of his works, was presented to the National Gallery in 1837, by an association of gentlemen, who purchased it of the painter's executors. Some of them wished to substitute for this gift the fine "Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows" with the rainbow, of which the "Salisbury," No. 1814, in the National Gallery, is a study, but "the boldness of its execution" we are told "stood in its way," and the "Cornfield" was purchased instead. The association of gentlemen need not have been apprehensive that the "boldness of the execution" of "Salisbury from the Meadows" would have frightened succeeding generations. The Munich Secessionists would call it commonplace, and the most old-fashioned member of the selecting committee of a current Royal Academy Exhibition would see in it only a fine picture, forcibly painted but too insistent on detail. The landscape point of view has changed since 1837.