dreadfully afraid of the establishment of a national collection of the old masters, and even said, 'When I sit down to make a sketch from nature, the first thing I try to do is to forget that I have ever seen a picture,' yet Constable was all the time very strongly under the influence of tradition. He might reject tradition in the sense of a respect for age — and varnish — for their own sakes, but in the sense of a wholesome reverence for broad and masterly work like that of the best masters of the seventeenth century, he adhered to it as the guiding principle of his art.
Like Turner, he held Claude in the highest honour. When staying with Sir George Beaumont at Coleorton Hall he occupied himself — not by wandering, sketch-book in hand, up and down the country-side — but in the highly orthodox task of copying most conscientiously his host's pictures by Claude. ' The Claudes, the Claudes are all, all I can think of here,' he writes home to his wife. ' How paramount is Claude ' ! he exclaims after a visit to a London collection of pictures. He sat, too, at the feet of Ruysdael, in whom he recognised a profound and poetical artist of a spirit akin to his oTO, and though at times to his own consciousness he might ' forget ' that he had ' ever seen a picture,' yet the pictures he had seen were all the while in- fluencing his mental attitude. The result was naturalistic art, but naturalistic art tempered by sound tradition, and his work aptly illustrates the excellent dictum of M. Thor6, ' There are three tilings which concur in the creation of a work of art, external nature, the special and profound feel- ing for that nature in the mind of the artist, and the feeling wMch nature has inspired in creative artists who have gone hefore!' We have only to visit the London National Gallery to discern Constable's relation to his predecessors. The leaves clotlie his trees in the solid masses of the foliage of Poussin ; the ponderous clouds that sweep so grandly over his broad expanses of sky have their prototypes on the noble canvas by Rembrandt's pupil De Koninck in the Peel Collection. Gainsborough, to take another ' naturalist ' of our older school, is, no more than Constable, a ' natural painter,' pure and simple. He shows how artistic tradition may haunt the air about a painter, and influence his whole education and procedure, without his setting himself down directly to imitate his predecessors. He was indeed ' natural ' in dis- tinction to Reynolds, who had a fancy for historical design, the secret of which had to be wrested from the followers of Michelangelo ; but his work in por- traiture was overshadowed by that of a great fore- runner, to whom both he and Reynolds owed much of the form of their art. 'AVe are all going to lieaven, and Vandyke is of the company.' . . . Van- dyke was in truth the model they both consciously or unconsciously followed. The tradition of his art had been handed down by incompetent successors, but it had survived in England till these great painters gave it a new life. Their breadth, their elegance, their faultless taste in pose and in the arrangement of dress and drapery, had been all elements in the art of the great seventeenth century portraitist, and Gainsborougli and Reynolds, the ' naturalist ' and the ' stylist,' both aUke acknowledge his headship.
A similar fact emerges in connection with a famous recent naturahstic movement in France. J. F. Millet was a complete heretic when judged by the ortliodox standard of his school and time, but Millet was an untiring and ardent student of the old masters, a votary of Michelangelo and the Venetians. The men with whom his name is chiefly associated, Dupre, Rousseau, Daubigny, though they broke with the classical traditions dominant in the French school, envisaged nature in very much the same manner as the Dutch landscapists of the seven- teenth century. Corot's art, it has been noticed, is the art of Claude touched with a more intimate modern sentiment.
In Gainsborough, Constable, Millet, and Corot, therefore, we see a ' naturalism ' based, if we may use the expression, on art ; an independence tempered by reverence for the past ; originality disciplined ; freedom gratefully conscious of support and guidance. How far is this the case with the ' naturalism ' of our own time and country .?
A friendly foreign critic, M. Chesneau, who has written appreciatively of our national art, is disposed to draw a distinct line of demarcation between what he calls the old school and the young school of British painters, fixing the division at about 1850. With the artists of the old school he feels at home. 'Reynolds, Gainsborough, Constable, can be measured by ordinary standards. They have, it is true, a well-defined individuality, but as descendants of the Dutch and the Flemings they are painters,' he says, ' of the same order as we ourselves, they understand their art in the way we French understand it.' The art of our own immediate time, on the other hand, is, he confesses, something quite new and exclusively British. There is no bond of tradition linking it to the family of great English painters of the beginning of the century ; it is a monstre etrange, as he is pleased to call it, attractive by its pecuharities, but standing quite out of the regular course of artistic history.
Few of those who studied carefully the collection
