ted by making sketches that might be used as subjects for his work. Golding Constable grew impatient and dismissed his sons taste for painting as a young mans whim, and with the need for help in the mills, Golding summons John back to Bergholt (Taylor, 17). To John, this summons could not have been more deviating, but fate was kinder than he would have expected. On February 4, 1800, Constable was admitted to the Royal Academy as a student. Golding Constable would give the allowance to cover the expenses, but it would be three years before John would win his fathers consent to his becoming once and for all a painter and not a miller. Consent would be given in June of 1802, and in 1802 John exhibited for the first time at the Academy. He had made his start, but it brought neither fame nor recognition (Peacock, 18). In 1806, David Pike Watts, Constables uncle, paid for him to make a sketching on a tour in the lakes. The tour would prove to evoke a sense of the sublime and provide him with the subjects to feed his imagination and extend his skills. Constables legacy of the two month lake tour compromises a number of broadly washed but muddy watercolors drawins, and a few paintings (Baskett, 8). For Constable, watercolor was chiefly used, as a kind of shorthand technique by which the effects of nature could be noted more swiftly and accurately than was sometimes possible in the more opaque medium of oil. Light, he found, could be captured well enough on a sheet of white paper. The translucent tones of watercolor laid in with broad and broken washes could admirably reproduce the varied patterning of sky and clouds, as well as the forms of trees and the play of sunlight over dewy grass. With Constable it is the sensation of the moment that counts, especially in the layer of watercolors. For John, light becomes the means by which reality may be heightened (Taylor, 20). In the next few years John produced a rich output of oil sketches....
