8 APRIL 1837, Page 19

FINE ARTS.

DEATH has thinned the top branches of the Academy lately, and there are many iu the sett: mid yellow leaf that may be expect.d to fall off ere lung, and make room for the younger shoots. CONOTALLL has fol- lowed SOANE and WEITALL, He died on Friday last week, after only a day's illness ; haying the night before attended a general meet- ing of the Academy. He was a healthy and robust man, and not more than sixty. The disease is said to have been an affection of the heart. Mr. CONSTABLE happened to be the Visiter for the month in the" Life Academy," when the schools closed finally at Somerset House, on the Saturday previous; and be took the opportunity to address the students on the occasion. His exhortation is rendered memorable by his sudden death.

As a landscape-painter, CONSTABLII was distinguished for the vigorous truth of his representations of natural scenes, in the early part of his career ; but latterly he had acquired a strange manner of trying to imitate the sparkle of sunlight after a shower, by scattering an in- finity of little specks of %bite light all over the picture : this gave the appearance of a shower of sleet falling—an effect which the bleak and cloudy aspect of the scene greatly assisted. CONSTABLE was the very opposite of TURNER; his effects being as cold and watery as TURNER'S are fiery, and his delineations as literal in their fidelity as TURNER'S are fanciful. Like TURNER'S, however, CONSTABLE'S paintings are defi- cient in repose—the prime essential of beauty in a landscape. The elements are in uproar,—clouds raining, sun shining, smoke rising, water rushing, and trees and hedges looking very uneasy. We are reminded of those hard-working scenes in a pantomime typical of in. dustry, where nature seems to be one vast factory, and every object condemned to perpetual toil.