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| "Landscape with Goatherd and Goats" after Claude by John Constable |
"My Very Dear Fisher,
Your letter is delightful, and its coming here serves to help me in the estimation of Sir George and Lady Beaumont. Nothing can be more kind, and in every possible way more obliging, than they both are to me. I am left entirely to do as I like, with full range over the whole house, in which I may saturate myself with art; only on condition of letting them do as they like.
I have copies one of the small Claudes, a "Breezy Sunrise," a most pathetic [affecting the emotions] picture. Perhaps a sketch would have served my present purpose, but I wished for a more lasting remembrance of it, and a sketch of a picture is only like seeing it in one view. It will not serve to drink at again and again. I have likewise begun the little grove by Claude, a noon-day scene which 'warms and cheers, but which does not inflame or irritate.' Through the depths of the trees are seen a waterfall and a ruined temple, and a solitary shepherd is piping to some goats and sheep...
I draw in the evening, and Lady or Sir George Beaumont reads aloud. Sir George has known intimately many persons of talent of the last half-century, and is full of anecdote. This is a magnificent country, abounding in the picturesque... In the breakfast room hang four Claudes, a Cozens, and a Swaneveldt. The sun glows on them as it sets. In the dark recesses of the gardens, and at the end of one of the walks, is a cenotaph erected to the memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds, and on it some beautiful lines by Wordsworth."
To be continued
(Excerpts from "Life and Letters of John Constable, R.A." by Charles Robert Leslie.)
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