In 1824 "The Hay Wain" was a fresh vision, very new and arresting. Why? Simply because Constable returned to Nature and painted Nature. Again and again has this happened in the history of art from the time of Giotto onwards. The little men falter on, copying one another, "studying pictures only," in Constable's phrase; the public accepts their wooden performances as true art; then the great man arises, often a very simple, straight-thinking, modest man like this John Constable, and the great man does nothing more miraculous than just to use his own eyes; he refuses to be dictated to by others as to what he should see and do, and lo! the world looks at what he has done, and either rejects him altogether (for a time), or says, "Here is a genius. Let us make much of him." One thing is certain. It was not by taking thought, by planning or scheming, that John Constable made that sensation at the Salon of 1824. It was born in him to be what he became--a painter of Nature. How easy and simple it seems. Everybody paints Nature to-day; but in the early years of last century one had to be a great original to break away from tradition and from academic formulæ, and to paint--just Nature. The awakening came to John Constable in 1802, when he was twenty-six years of age. In a letter to his friend Dunthorne, Constable wrote from London: "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 little or nothing in the Exhibitions worth looking up to. _There is room for a natural painter_." A natural painter he became--the painter of England, of simple rural scenes. At forty-seven years of age he lamented that he had never visited Italy, but the mood passed as quickly as it came, and he cries: "No, but I was born to paint a happier land, my own dear old England." And from his own dear old England he banished the brown tree. But the droll story of the Brown Tree deserves a new chapter. CHAPTER II THE BROWN TREE "A constant communion with pictures, the tints of which are subdued by time, no doubt tends to unfit the eye for the enjoyment of freshness."