Page:Chats on old prints (IA chatsonoldprints00haydiala).pdf/386

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Acland and Children, all after Sir Thomas Lawrence.

It should be mentioned that in 1820 William Say engraved a portrait in mezzotint of Queen Caroline wrought upon steel. Hitherto copper only was used. In 1822 T. Lupton obtained 1,500 prints from a steel plate, and received the gold medal of the Society of Arts for his invention. Mezzotints on steel are therefore a feature of early nineteenth-century days after 1820.

John Constable, son of a Suffolk miller, studied the wayward moods of Nature with hardly less thoroughness than Turner himself. He was never enthralled in the meshes of classicism, and deliberately avoided the temple and the conventional brown tree. His foliage for the first time in England was as green as Nature herself. In France even more than in England his work found early recognition, and in the Salon of 1824 his Hay Wain and his Lock on the Stour created a profound sensation, which did not a little towards turning French artists to Nature. The Barbizon school owes much to Constable.

Constable found an interpretative engraver in David Lucas. The first series of "English Landscape" consisted of twenty-one plates, and may be procured in open-letter proof state for about eight guineas. From this series (1830-1832) we reproduce two illustrations, Spring and Noon. Of the former a portion has been enlarged (opposite p. 50). Many of these proofs, as, for example, the engraver's proof of Salisbury Cathedral (before the rainbow) are worth four or five guineas. A Heath (Hampstead,