Page:Constable by C. J. Holmes.djvu/44

 seems to have caused Constable so much trouble, or to have been so often re-worked by him. Though it was an unpopular painting at the Academy, it is one of his most glowing and brilliant productions. Leslie says that all its brightness was destroyed by a picture-dealer, who covered the picture with coats of blacking and varnish to "tone" it. It would appear that this damage has since been repaired. Certainly, when the picture was last exhibited at Burlington House the impression it left was one of extraordinary splendour and power, in spite of the masses of loaded pigment in the sky. Constable's chief Academy picture of 1833 was Englefield House, Berkshire—Morning. A small water-colour of the subject, dated 1832, may be seen at Kensington. In the same room is a larger version of Old Sarum, one of the water-colours which were all that he could exhibit in 1834 owing to ill-health.

In his single Academy picture of 1835, the famous Valley Farm, Constable returns for the last time to the haunts of his youth, Willy Lott's cottage and the Flatford mill-stream by it. Attention has already been called to the finest of his many sketches of the composition. The majestic Cenotaph in the National Gallery, a view of the monument to Reynolds in the grounds at Coleorton, was Constable's principal Academy picture of 1836. The sketch for it, probably made during the painter's visit to Sir George Beaumont in 1823, is at Kensington. At Kensington, too, may be seen Constable's other Academy exhibit of 1836, a large water-colour of Stonehenge, seen under a tremendous effect of storm. In the same room hangs the brilliant sketch in oils of A Windmill near Brighton, the upright composition engraved by Lucas for the "English Landscape." The sketch and the engraving are placed side by side, so that it is easy to note how the painter, with the strong colour and loaded pigment characteristic of his last years, has aimed at an effect of brilliant sunlight and contrast, while the engraver's feeling for breadth has so softened the abrupt transitions that the scene has become grand and majestic. Before the opening of the Academy of 1837 Constable was dead, but his friends thought that his large picture of Arundel Mill was sufficiently finished to be shown in the Exhibition. The engraving of it by Lucas is not the most successful of his plates, being overcrowded with detail. The composition would have looked better had it been reproduced upon a larger scale.

Constable's comparatively early death was not in all respects 24