National Gallery, London
Much has been written about John Constable’s success at the Paris Salon of 1824, but his participation in the next Salon of 1827–8 has received far less attention. This relative neglect is perhaps not so surprising, given that the single painting he exhibited,
The Cornfield 1826 (fig.1), did not repeat his earlier triumph. The same Salon at which Constable met with a critical setback, however, also marked the debut of Paul Huet, the artist usually regarded as his closest French follower. But if critics and artists seem out of step in their attitudes to the English artist in the later 1820s, the real flowering of Huet’s engagement with Constable has often been overlooked, since it came more than a quarter of a century later.