voi Cesnature. What Constable seeks to demonstrate in the second lecture is how the great landscape
artist uses this understanding as the basis of poetic expression and this too is something that
artists can learn from the study of great art. hence, the mannerists are doubly flawed, they don’t
attend to nature and they slavishly copy past masters.
8 george Field. 1835. Chromatography: or a treatise on colours and pigments. london. a 2007
edition of this text exists, edited by Thomas salter.
9 stendhal has been called a romantic realist. honoré de Balzac (1779–1850) rose to prominence
in the early 1840s.
10 in 1854, eugène delacroix (1798–1863) claimed Constable as the ‘father’ of modern French
landscape painting, whilst Frédéric Villot (1809–1875) labelled him its ‘messiah’.
11 For example, in speaking of pre- and early- Renaissance german, dutch and Flemish artists,
Constable observes that, ‘in their hands dignity of subject never excluded meanness, and the
wretched material introduced into their historical pictures could have led to nothing’, and
continues by saying of these schools that, ‘The accompaniments even of the nativity were often,
with them, an assemblage of the mean and ridiculous. an owl, seen through a hole in a thatched
roof, sitting on a beam just over the head of the Virgin, with a mouse dangling by its tail from his
claw; pigs quarrelling at the trough, etc.’ (leslie 1951: 293).