Still I should paint my own places best; painting is with me but another word for feeling, and I associate "my careless boyhood" with all that lies o… - John Constable

The attempt to revive styles that have existed in former ages, may for a time appear to be successful, but experience may now surely teach us its impossibility. I might put on a suit of Claude Lorraine's clothes and walk into the street, and the many who knew Claude but slightly would pull off their hats to me, but I should at last meet with some one, more intimately acquainted with him, who would expose me to the contempt I merited. It is thus in all the fine arts. A new Gothic building, or a new missal, is in reality little less absurd than a new ruin.

But the sound of water escaping from mill-dams, &c., willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts, and brickwork, I love such things. Shakespeare could make everything poetical; he tells us of poor Tom's haunts among "sheep cotes and mills." As long as I do paint, I shall never cease to paint such places. They have always been my delight.

A self-taught painter is one taught by a very ignorant person.