In London he became acquainted with one John Smith, known as "Antiquity Smith," who taught him something of etching. After he was recalled to his father's business, his mother wrote to "Antiquity Smith," that she hoped John "would now attend to business, by which he will please me and his father, and ensure his own respectability and comfort"--a complete expression of the middle-class British mind. Her satisfaction was short-lived, for her son soon returned to London. When his first pictures were rejected by the Royal Academy he showed one of them to Sir Benjamin West, who said hopefully: "Don't be disheartened, young man, we shall hear of you again; you must have loved nature very much before you could have painted this." About that time he tried to paint many kinds of pictures, such as portraits and sacred subjects, but he did not seem to succeed in anything except the scenes of his boyhood, which he truly loved. Hence he gave up attempting that which he could do only passably, and kept to what he could do supremely well. When his friends wished him to continue portrait painting, the only thing that was well paid at that time, Constable wrote: "You know I have always succeeded best with my native scenes. They have always charmed me, and I hope they always will. I have now a path marked out very distinctly for myself, and I am desirous of pursuing it uninterruptedly." About the time he fell in love and before his father's death, his health began to fail, and the young woman's mother would have none of him. Her father was in favour of Constable, but he could not hold out against the chance of his daughter losing her grandfather's fortune by marrying the wrong man. The lady was not so distractingly in love as young Constable was, and she did not entirely like the idea of poverty, even with John, so she held off, and with so much anxiety Constable became downright ill. For five years the pair lived apart, and then the artist and the young woman, whose name was Maria Bicknell, lost their mothers about the same time, This drew them very closely together; and to help the matter on, John's attendance upon his father in his last illness brought him to the same town as Miss Bicknell. After his father's death, he urged the young lady so strongly to be his wife that she consented They were married and her father soon forgave her, but not so her grandfather, who declared that he never would forgive her, but he really must have done so from the first, for when he died it was found that he had left her a little fortune of £4,000. This was about the same amount the artist had received from his father, so that they were able to get on very well.