Reproduced, by the courtesy of W.H. Fuller, from "Memoirs of the Life of John Constable, Esq., R.A., Composed Chiefly of his Letters, by C.R. Leslie, R.A." Quarto, London, 1843. This noble memoir, which makes one love the man as one admires the painter, is unfortunately out of print.] Of the dreary waste of "historical" and arbitrarily composed landscapes, even in the simpler honest productions of the Dutch preceding this century, nearly all were painted from drawings; color had been applied according to recipe; the brown tree was rampant through all the seasons represented, from primavernal spring to golden autumn. At the most, only studies in colors were made out of doors--unrelated portions of pictures, stained rather than painted, with timid desire to enregister details. These were then transported to the studio, where they underwent a process of arrangement, of "cookery," as the typically just French expression puts it; from which the picture came out steeped in a "brown sauce," conventional, artificial, and monotonous, but pleasing to the Academy-ridden public of the time. The young "miller of Bergholt"--for it was there in the county of Suffolk that young Constable first saw the light, on June 11, 1776--determined in 1803 to have done with convention. He writes to a friend, one Dunthorne, who had had much influence on his early life and was his first teacher: "For the last two years I have been running after pictures and seeking truth at second hand;" adding that he would hereafter study nature alone, convinced that "there is [was] room enough for a natural painter." [Illustration: FLATFORD MILL, ON THE RIVER STOUR. FROM A PAINTING BY JOHN CONSTABLE, NOW IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON. This picture was given to the National Gallery by the painter's children. It is possibly one of three pictures on which Constable obtained the gold medal of the Paris Salon in 1822--the one which in the Salon catalogue is entitled "A Canal." The other two were "The Hay-Wain" (shown on the next page) and "Hampstead Heath," both now in the National Gallery.]