young days he had made copies after Claude, Rubens, Reynolds, Ruysdael, Teniers, and Wilson, which might have been mistaken for the originals, but later he had learnt much from Girtin's water-colour paintings. From that time he felt that he was strong enough to trust his own eyes. He threw to the winds all that had hitherto been considered as the chief element of beauty, and gave up the rounding of his pictures for pictorial effect; cut trees right through the middle to get into his picture just what interested him, and no more. [Illustration: _S. Low & Co._ CONSTABLE. THE VALLEY FARM.] [Illustration: _S. Low & Co._ COX. CROSSING THE SANDS.] He set himself right in the midst of verdure; the nightingales sang, the leaves murmured, the meadows grew green, and the clouds gleamed. In the fifteenth-century art there were the graceful spring trees of Perugino; in the seventeenth, the bright spring days of those two Flemings Jan Silberecht and Lucas Uden; in the nineteenth, Constable became the first painter of spring. If Sir George Beaumont now asked him where he meant to put his brown tree, he answered: "Nowhere, because I don't paint brown trees any more." He saw that foliage is green in summer, and--painted it so; he saw that summer rain and morning dew makes the verdure more than usually intense, and--he painted what he saw. He noticed that green leaves sparkle, gleam, and glitter in the sun--and painted them accordingly; he saw that the light, when it falls upon bright-looking walls, dazzles like snow in the sunshine--and painted it accordingly. There was a good deal of jeering at the time about "Constable's snow," and yet it was not merely all succeeding English artists who continued to put their faith in this painting of light, but the masters of Barbizon too, and Manet afterwards. [Illustration: _Mansell_ BONINGTON. LA PLACE DES MOULARDS, GENEVA.]