Page:Constable by C. J. Holmes.djvu/39

 some of which were mezzotinted by Lucas. Those that especially deserve notice are the brilliant Brighton Beach with Colliers, the Cirrus Clouds (No. 784) at Kensington, and the study of a rainstorm passing over a grey-blue sea in the Diploma Gallery. A pencil-drawing in the British Museum shows that he visited Arundel in this year.

Constable's art was now fully matured, and he was obtaining a fair share of recognition, owing to the sensation made by the exhibition of The Haywain and other pictures in Paris. In 1825 his White Horse was exhibited at Lille, and obtained a Gold Medal; while at the Academy he was represented by one of his most magnificent works, The Leaping Horse. We are fortunate in being able to trace its evolution from the rough sepia studies in the British Museum to the large oil-sketch at Kensington, and thence on to the finished work in the Diploma Gallery. Owing to its scale it appeared unwise to reproduce the latter here, but in no other single picture are Constable's peculiar excellences more happily combined and balanced. The Leaping Horse shows his mastery of cool colour, the horse in front and the group of trees behind are most nobly conceived; while the handling is as bold and fresh as the most advanced modern could desire, without the spottiness that usually deforms all efforts at extreme brilliancy. About this time he must have made some of the best of his sketches at Kensington—the Hampstead Heath (No. 122), the Landscape with Cottage, The Grove, Hampstead, a fit companion to the well-known Romantic House in the National Gallery, and the water-colour Houses with a Church Tower (Dedham?) (No. 347).

The year 1806 marks the turning-point of Constable's career. Up to that time he had been a careful but hardly brilliant imitator of the old masters. The sketch of Dedham Vale, dated 1802, is the only work which shows any indication of the path he was afterwards to follow. When he visited the Lake District he really threw aside tradition, and sketched in the fresh colouring of nature, though he failed when he tried to employ the new scheme on a larger scale. In a sketch unity can easily be obtained by devices that are impossible in large pictures, where the composition has to be built up by elaborate machinery. Feeling that he could not as yet control this machinery, Constable set himself to learn its secrets by returning to the study of Reynolds and others of the 19