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manner, and in the complex, laboured palette. The compact tree mass in the foreground is blocked in against a sky filled with

movement, reflected in the calm and transparent waters over which plays a pallid sun, as we find in Ruisdael.

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For Constable I have an affection that goes back to my earliest reco^ections. In the first years of my childhood, there hung in the

halls of my father's house a large steel engraving of "The Cornfield". Often in the long hot summers of the Middle West, I used to lie

on the floor, gazing for hours into this English landscape carried from the dry and burning world around me into a vista of blessed

coolness, thick verdure, dampness and everlasting peace.

I lived in that picture. To me it was more beautiful than a dream: the boy, flat on the ground drinking from a running brook; the sheep

dog waiting patiently with turned head; the ambling flock; the old silent trees; the fat clouds reeking moisture ...

Some years later, when I went to London to study pictures, I saw "The Cornfield" and many others by Constable, and my first

impressions were confirmed. In his grasp of the stable, one might almost say formidable, repose that man feels in the presence of

nature, and in communicating the spiritual contentment induced by companionships with nature, Constable is the master of the

English school.

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Constable never travelled outside England. He was slow to develop as an artist, and slow to become famous. In all these things

he was the very opposite of Turner. If he was Wordsworthian in his attitude to nature, Turner was Byronic. The elements which seem

so domesticated in Constable's pictures are at their most extreme and battling in Turner's grandest pictures. The large "Fire at Sea"

depicts man's hopeless fight amid storm and disaster. Human beings are literal flotsam in a raging sea. Turner himself actually

experienced the "Snowstorm: Steamboat off a Harbour Mouth" in which wind and snow and spray sport with the unfortunate

steamboat until it is barely visible except for a straining mast. There is a tremendous exhilarating terror in this moment when all

nature's forces are unleashed. Something of the same drama is in "Rain, Steam, and Speed", where the glowing train forces its way

over the high viaduct through the driving mist and rain — and here man is winning through, thanks to the newly invented steam

engine. But Turner's intense receptivity to nature's moods made him able to capture also moments of utter tranquility. In the "Evening

Star" there is nothing but the merging of sea and sky, day and night, as evening slowly sucks the colour from things; and only the

diamond point of the single star shines out, caught tremblingly on the dark water. The same poignancy hovers about "The Fighting

Téméraire" in which between dusk and day an old ship is tugged to its last berth. The ghostly hulk floats over the calm glassy sea,

and the sun sinks like a bonfire in the west, seeming a symbol of the life that is ended, stirring us to a quite irrational sadness for days