Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, No. 359, September 1845

Very early in Constable's career, he adopted the principle which regulated through life the character of his painting. "There is room enough," he writes, after considering the Exhibition of 1802--"There is room enough for a natural painter. The great vice of the present day is bravura--an attempt to do something beyond the truth. Fashion always had, and always will have, its day; but truth in all things only will last, and can only have just claims on posterity." Here, indeed, he felt, and justly, that there was an opening for him in the school of English landscape. Gainsborough, who had first communicated truth and life to the treatment of the genuine scenery of England, was no more. It is true, the grosser absurdities of the Smiths of Chichester, a