Constable's powerful individuality has brought forth enduring fruit, and helped English landscape painting to attain that noble prime which it enjoyed during the forties and fifties. With his rich, brilliant, bold, and finely coloured painting, _David Cox_ stands out as perhaps the greatest of Constable's successors. Like Constable, he was a peasant, and observed nature with the simplicity of one who was country-bred. He was born in 1783, the son of a blacksmith, in a humble spot near Birmingham, and, after a brief sojourn in London, migrated with his family to Hereford, and later to Harborne, also in the neighbourhood of Birmingham. The strip of country which he saw from his house was almost exclusively his field of study. He knew that a painter can pass his life in the same corner of the earth, and that the scene of nature spread before him will never be exhausted. "Farewell, pictures, farewell," he is reported to have said when he took his last walk, on the day before his death, round the walls of Harborne. He has treated of the manner in which he understood his art in his _Treatise on Landscape Painting_, written in 1814. His ideal was to see the most cogent effect in nature, and leave everything out which did not harmonise with its character; and in Cox's pictures it is possible to trace the steps by which he drew nearer to this ideal the more natural he became. The magic of his brush was never more captivating than in the works of his last years, when, fallen victim to a disease of the eye, he could no longer see distinctly and only rendered an impression of the whole scene.