EARLY DRAWINGS BY CONSTABLE.* SIR CHARLES HOLMES points out how
clumsy were Constable's early drawings ; it took a long while for the master to teach himself to express his thoughts adequately. Long and arduous was the work which Constable did to make himself a great painter. He copied and he drew from Nature, and at last emerged a master in every sense. Such methods, as Sir Charles Holmes remarks, are not in fashion now, though we have yet to wait for the masterpiece done without study. In the present work are to be found a number of reproductions of Constable's chalk drawings from Nature of his early time, and each is accompanied by an explanatory note. Here we can see the striving and the incomplete realization. There is no case of youthful brilliancy, but of slow plodding. In some of the drawings there is more than a promise of what is to come, and in the second example there is that power of conveying the personality of a tree which was this painter's revelation to the world.
We arc given a short notice of the connexion between Constable and Lucas. The latter only came to perfection when he was interpreting Constable's landscapes, and then his mezzotints were incomparable. One of these reproduced here is of extraordinary beauty. Sir Charles Holmes concludes by saying : " The felicitous daring with which all his sketches are planned gives them an everlasting freshness and variety, which no other landscape painter in Europe has ever shown to the same degree, and the time is not, I think, far distant when Constable's greatness will be seen to rest far more on his brilliant sketches and studies than upon the elaborate exhibition pictures he constructed from them."
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