His pictures were collectively "exact" views of places which he loved, and neither composed landscapes nor paintings of "beautiful regions." Crome painted frankly everything which Norfolk, his own county, had to offer him--weather-beaten oaks, old woods, fishers' huts, lonely pools, wastes of heath. The way he painted trees is extraordinary. Each has its own physiognomy, and looks like a living thing, like some gloomy Northern personality. Oaks were his peculiar specialty, and in later years they only found a similarly great interpreter in Théodore Rousseau. At the same time his pictures of the simplest scenes have a remarkable largeness of conception, and a subtlety of colour recalling the old masters, and reached by no other painter in that age. An uncompromising realist, he drew his portraits of nature with almost pedantic pains, but preserved their relation of colour throughout. And as a delicate adept in colouring he finally harmonised everything in the manner of the Dutch to a juicy brown tone, which gives his beautiful wood and field pictures a discreet and refined beauty, a beauty in keeping with the art of galleries. [Illustration: _L'Art._ CONSTABLE. THE CORNFIELD.] Crome took a long time before he made a way for himself. His whole life long he sold his work merely at moderate prices: for no picture did he ever receive more than fifty pounds. Even his end was uneventful. He had begun as a manual worker, and he died in 1821 as a humble townsman whose only place of recreation was the tavern, and who passed his leisure in the society of sailors, shopkeepers, and artisans. Yet the principles of his art survived him. In 1805 he had founded in Norwich, far from all Academies, a society of artists, who gave annual exhibitions and had a common studio, which each used at fixed hours. _Cotman_, whose specialty was ash-trees, _the younger Crome_, _Stark_, and _Vincent_, are the leading representatives of the vigorous school of Norwich; and by them the name of this town became as well known as an art-centre in Europe as Delft and Haarlem had been in former times. Their relation to the Dutch was similar to that of Georges Michel in France, or that of Achenbach in Germany. They painted what they saw, rounded it with a view to pictorial effect, and harmonised the whole in a delicate brown tone. They felt more attracted by the form of objects than by their colour; the latter was, in the manner of the Dutch, merely an epidermis delicately toned down. The next step of the English painters was that they became the first to get the better of this Dutch phase, and to found that peculiarly modern landscape painting which no longer sets out from the absolutely concrete reality of objects, but from the _milieu_, from the atmospheric effect; which values in a picture less what is ready-made and perfectly rounded in drawing than the freshly seized impression of nature.