Study of a Grove of Trees

This small painting once ascribed to John Constable is of the sort that opened the eyes of a whole generation of French Romantic artists, including Paul Huet. It was Constable’s submissions to the Salon of 1824 in Paris that prompted Huet to write: "It was the first time perhaps that one felt the warmth, the first time that one saw nature [in a picture] as lush, verdant, without black, without crudeness, without affectation." The unprecedented sensitivity to natural detail, and the respect accorded to a subject matter that counted for nothing by the traditional standards of the Academy, gave added stimulus to artists of the Romantic movement who had already begun to launch a new vision of landscape art.