Another good story was told Redgrave by Lee. ‘I hear you sell all your pictures,’ said Constable to the younger landscape-painter. ‘Why, yes,’ said Lee; ‘I’m pretty fortunate. Don’t you sell yours?’ ‘No,’ said Constable, ‘I don’t sell any of my pictures, and I’ll tell you why: when I paint a _bad_ picture I don’t like to part with it, and when I paint a _good_ one I like to keep it.’ It is well known that one year when Constable was on the Council of the Royal Academy, one of his own pictures was passed by mistake before the judges. ‘Cross it,’ said one. ‘It won’t do,’ said another. ‘Pass on,’ said a third. And the carpenter was just about to chalk it with a cross, when he read the name of ‘John Constable.’ Of course there were lame apologies, and the picture was taken from the condemned heap and placed with the works of his brother Academicians. But after work was over Constable took the picture under his arm, and, despite the remonstrance of his brother colleagues, marched off with it, saving: ‘I can’t think of its being hung after it has been fairly turned out. The work so condemned was the ‘Stream bordered in with Willows,’ now in the South Kensington Museum. Leslie once remarked to Redgrave that he would give any work he had painted for it, so warmly did he admire it. ‘Constable is the best landscape-painter we have,’ wrote Frith to his mother in 1835. ‘He is a very merry fellow, and very rich. He told us an anecdote of a man who came to look at his pictures; he was a gardener. One day he called him into his painting-room to look at his pictures, when the man made the usual vulgar remarks, such as, “Did you do all this, sir?” “Yes.” “What, all this?” “Yes.” “What, frame and all?” At last he came to an empty frame that was hung against the wall without any picture in it, when he said to Constable, “But you don’t call this picture quite finished, do you, sir?” Constable said that quite sickened him, and he never let any ignoramuses ever see his pictures again, or frames either.’ Constable’s great merits, writes Mr. Frith, were first recognised in France, with the result upon French landscape art that is felt at the present time. His advice to Frith was: ‘Never do anything without nature before you if it be possible to have it. See those weeds and the dock leaves? They are to come into the foreground of this picture. I know dock leaves pretty well, but I should not attempt to introduce them into a picture without having them before me.’ Constable died very suddenly in 1837. His fame, now that he is dead, is greater than when he was alive. His work abides in all its strength.