At the most, only studies in colors were made out of
doors--unrelated portions of pictures, stained rather than painted,
with timid desire to enregister details. These were then transported
to the studio, where they underwent a process of arrangement, of
"cookery," as the typically just French expression puts it; from
which the picture came out steeped in a "brown sauce," conventional,
artificial, and monotonous, but pleasing to the Academy-ridden public
of the time. The young "miller of Bergholt"--for it was there in the
county of Suffolk that young Constable first saw the light, on June
11, 1776--determined in 1803 to have done with convention. He writes
to a friend, one Dunthorne, who had had much influence on his early
life and was his first teacher: "For the last two years I have been
running after pictures and seeking truth at second hand;" adding that
he would hereafter study nature alone, convinced that "there is [was]
room enough for a natural painter."
[Illustration: FLATFORD MILL, ON THE RIVER STOUR. FROM A PAINTING BY
JOHN CONSTABLE, NOW IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON.
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