Page:Constable by C. J. Holmes.djvu/46

 nature. After his fiftieth year Constable became a devotee of light and air. He found, as the moderns have found, that this devotion was incompatible with the traditional handling of oil-paint—with smooth shapely brushwork passing by adroit transitions into a harmonious foundation of broken grey or brown, and afterwards mellowed by a warm glaze. To suggest the shimmer of wet grass and leaves in sunlight, or the intense brightness of the summer sky, he had to use paint fresh from the tube, loading parts of his canvas with spots and masses of pure pigment, so that no single atom of illumination might be lost. His method, in fact, was almost identical with that of our modern scientific painters, except in one important respect.

The essential difference is that Constable retained to the last his sound foundation in monochrome. Paintings like The Leaping Horse, The Valley Farm, and The Cenotaph, with all their splashing and spotting and scraping and loading, have thus a certain unity and dignity, which enables them to hang by the side of the paintings of the old masters, without looking garish or undecided. The very limitations of interest and insight which prevent Constable from ranking with Michelangelo or Titian or Rembrandt, have at least allowed him to achieve a success which at present remains unique. To blame him for not anticipating the feeling for a less conventional spacing, which has been stimulated during the last forty years by the discovery of the art of Japan, would be as unfair as to insist on the fact that his technique is less supremely certain or his taste less intensely sensitive than that of the greatest artists of the past. It is only necessary to compare his work with that of his predecessors or contemporaries, to realize how vast was the revolution that he initiated, more especially in the matter of colour, which he treated with a combination of frankness and temperance as yet unsurpassed. No man has hitherto combined so much of that beauty of aspect which we all admire in the Art of the past, with so large a measure of the wind and sunshine which have become the condition of the painting of our own day. Had Constable carried realism further, it might have been difficult to claim so much for him. 26