The problem of painting light and air, which the older school had left unsolved, was taken up by him first in its complete extent. Crome had shown great reserve in approaching the atmospheric elements. Constable was the first landscape painter who really saw effects of light and air and learnt to paint them. His endeavour was to embody the impression of a mood of light with feeling, without lingering on the reproduction of those details which are only perceptible to an analytical eye. Whereas in the old Dutch masters the chief weight is laid on the effect of the drawing of objects, here it rests upon light, no matter upon what it plays. Thus Constable freed landscape painting from the architectonic laws of composition. They were no longer needed when the principle was once affirmed that the atmospheric mood gave greater value to the picture than subject. He not only studied the earth and foliage in their various tones, according as they were determined by the atmosphere, but observed the sky, the air, and the forms of cloud with the conscientiousness of a student of natural philosophy. The comments which he wrote upon them are as subtle as those in Ruskin's celebrated treatise on the clouds. A landscape, according to him, is only beautiful in proportion as light and shadow make it so; in other words, he was the first to understand that the "mood" of a landscape, by which it appeals to the human spirit, depends less on its lines and on objects in themselves than on the light and shadow in which it is bathed, and he was the first painter who had the secret of painting these subtle gradations of atmosphere. In his pictures the wind is heard murmuring in the trees, the breeze is felt as it blows over the corn, the sunlight is seen glancing on the leaves and playing on the clear mirror of the waters. Thus Constable for the first time painted nature in all its freshness. His principle of artistic creation is entirely opposed to that which was followed by the Pre-Raphaelites at a later date. Whilst the latter tried to reconstruct a picture of nature by a faithful, painstaking execution of all details--a process by which the expression of the whole usually suffers--Constable's pictures are broadly and impressively painted, often of rude and brutal force, at times solemn, at times elegant, but always cogent, fresh, and possessing a unity of their own. [Illustration: _S. Low & Co._ COX. THE SHRIMPERS.] A genius in advance of its age is only first recognised in its full significance when following generations have come abreast with it. And that Constable was made to feel. In 1837 he died in poverty at Hampstead, in the modest "country retreat" where he spent the greatest part of his life. He said that his painting recalled no one, and was neither polished nor pretty, and asked: "How can I hope to be popular? I work only for the future." And that belonged to him. [Illustration: _Portfolio._ MÜLLER. THE AMPHITHEATRE AT XANTHUS.]