Page:Constable by C. J. Holmes.djvu/27

 itself an inadequate motive for elaborate oil-painting. Gainsborough and Crome, it is true, made charming pictures out of very simple subjects, but they are made charming by art, and not by sincere imitation of nature.

The case of Turner is somewhat different. Turner all his life held to the ideals of the riper old masters, that is to say, his primary object was the making of splendid pictorial compositions. His naturalism was essentially secondary to that main purpose, which in middle and late life resolved itself into studies in harmonized and contrasted colours. Nevertheless, his amazing memory, observation, and skill, compelled him to use natural forms and sometimes natural colours, as his vehicles of expression; though he used them in quite an arbitrary way, and discarded them without hesitation, when there was a risk of their interfering with the scale or intensity of his effects.

Constable's attitude was the exact opposite of Turner's. Born and bred in the midst of fresh English fields and meadows, he was a sincere and devoted lover of nature before he became a lover of painting. Unlike many other painters who have been able to admire the things around them only through some resemblance, real or fanciful, to the pictures they have been accustomed to reverence. Constable saw from the first that the art of Italy or the Netherlands was not like the Dedham Valley, and that if he was to paint the elms and streams and sky which he loved, he could not do so by giving them the colour and appearance of distant countries which he had never seen. Thus, when he came to study the old masters, he did so with an unbiassed mind. Claude and Ruysdael could not teach him anything about Suffolk scenery that he did not already know, but they could teach him a great deal about something of which he was entirely ignorant—a sound way of constructing pictures—and Constable never forgot the lesson. 7