A certain Dunthorne, an eccentric personage to whom the boy often came, gave him--always in the open air--his first instruction; and another of his patrons, Sir George Beaumont, as an æsthetically trained connoisseur, criticised what he painted. When Constable showed him a study he asked: "Where do you mean to place your brown tree?" For the first law in his æsthetics was this: a good painting must have the colour of a good fiddle; it must be brown. Sojourn in London was without influence on Constable. He was twenty-three years of age, a handsome young fellow with dark eyes and a fine expressive countenance, when, in 1799, he wrote to his teacher Dunthorne: "I am this morning admitted a student at the Royal Academy; the figure which I drew for admittance was the Torso. I am now comfortably settled in Cecil Street, Strand, No. 23." He was known to the London girls as "the handsome young miller of Bergholt." He undertook the most varied things, copied pictures of Reynolds, and painted an altar-piece, "Christ blessing Little Children," which was admired by no one except his mother. In addition he studied Ruysdael, whose works made a great impression on him, in the National Gallery. In 1802 he appears for the first time in the Catalogue of the Royal Academy as the exhibitor of a landscape, and from this time to the year of his death, 1837, he was annually represented there, contributing altogether one hundred and four pictures. In the earliest--windmills and village parties--every detail is carefully executed; every branch is painted on the trees, and every tile on the houses; but as yet one can breathe no air in these pictures and see no sunshine.