During this time, three men, working on very diverse lines, made themselves felt as far more original personalities. Two of these were geniuses, Constable (1776-1837) and Turner (i775– 1851) and the third a charming painter and delicious colourist, Bonington (1802-28) who should have gone very far had he lived. Constable.—John Constable is the first English landscape painter to ask no lessons from the Dutch. He is rather indebted to the landscapes of Rubens, but his real model was Gainsborough, whose landscapes, with great trees planted in well-balanced masses on land sloping upwards towards the frame, have a rhythm often found in Rubens. His originality does not lie in choice of subjects, which frequently repeat themes beloved by Gainsborough. Never theless, Constable seems really to belong to another century; he ushers in a new era and this difference results at once from tech nique and feeling. Excepting the Frenchman, Desportes, who 100 years before painted the fragmentary studies to which atten tion has only recently been drawn, Constable is the first land scape painter to consider as a primary and essential task the sketch made direct from nature at a single sitting, an idea which contains in germ a great part of the destinies of the modern landscape, and even perhaps, in a more general way, of modern painting. It is this momentary impression—of all things the most irreducible and individual, the least susceptible of voluntary reproduction—which, contained in this sketch like a rare perfume in a sealed vase, will be the soul of the future picture. Working at leisure upon the large canvas the artist's aim will be to enrich and complete the sketch while retaining its pristine freshness. These are the two processes to which Constable devoted himself, discovering the exuberant abundance of life in the simplest country places where there is a sky across which the white or grey clouds hasten, where trees rustle their innumerable leaves and waters glide between tall weeds starred with dewdrops and flecks of light; and, to express all these primitive and eternal things which enchant him, he has the palette of a creative colour ist and a technique of vivid hatchings heralding that of the French Impressionists. He audaciously and frankly introduced green into painting, the green of lush meadows, the green of summer foliage, all the greens which, until then, painters had refused to see except through bluish, yellow, or more often brown glasses.
Constable's technique and particularly his method of securing the freshness and intensity of his greens by the juxtaposition of multifarious tones were a revelation to Delacroix, as is evidenced by his Journal and Correspondence. After seeing the works of the illustrious English landscapist he repainted, it is said, the whole background of his great canvas Le Massacre de Scio. Of great landscapists who occupy so important a place in 29th cen tury art Corot was, I believe, the only one to escape the influence of Constable. All the others are more or less direct descendants of the master of East Bergholt.
It was only, and this is worthy of note, in 1819 that Turner went to Italy, to go again in 1829 and 1840. I will not say that these journeys served no purpose, for certainly Turner experi enced emotions and found subjects for reverie which he later translated in terms of his own genius into symphonies of light and colour. But, except for his output of illustrations which were much and most deservedly admired, we wonder whether this great rover, this creator of lofty scenes, this romantic singer of classical lands, might not have found, in his unaided imagination, all that he needed to build those visions which are the strangest and most beautiful part of his work, that which, in spite of the faults inevitable in so novel an enterprise, made the name of Joseph Mallord William Turner famous above all others of his nation. To create the wondrous gleam of changing rainbow colour in his skies, would it not have sufficed him to dream before the mother-of-pearl of a shell or the changing fires of an opal? and did he need to wander so far to evoke beneath Italian names the azure waves of Shakespeare's sea which laps Bohemia's coasts or that legendary land which knows no other sceptre but Queen Mab's? The logic of reason does not count for this northern imagination. But no Latin, I believe, has had, or ever will have, that other logic, to him almost monstrous, of the Englishman consumed by a solitary and royal dream, indefinable and full of marvels, and who, thus possessed, does not distinguish reality or life, even his own, from the pictures he creates, to reflect at least some traces of the dream. The dream of the Latin, be he Venetian or French, is one of happiness, at once heroic and human. Ardour is tem pered with melancholy, as shadow strives with light. Melancholy, even as it appears in the enigmatic and profound creation of Albrecht Diirer, finds no home in Turner's protean fairyland; what place could it have in a cosmic dream? Humanity does not appear there, except perhaps as stage characters at whom we hardly glance. Compare his Polyphemus, one of his most admir able masterpieces, with Poussin's Polypheme. Turner's picture fascinates us and yet we think of nothing precise, nothing human; only unforgettable colours and phantoms lay hold on our imagina tions. Humanity really only inspires him when linked with the idea of death, but strange death, a lyrical dissolution—like the finale of an opera.