Later Fisher wrote: "I have a great desire to possess your 'Wain,' but I cannot now reach what it is worth;" and he begged Constable not to sell it without giving him a chance to try once more to raise the money to buy it. He wrote that the picture would become of greater value to his children if the artist left it hanging upon the walls of the Academy, "till you join the society of Ruysdael, Wilson, and Claude. As praise and money will then be of no value to you, the world will liberally bestow both."
Later a Frenchman wished to buy it for exhibition purposes, and when Constable wrote to Fisher of this, his friend replied that he had better sell it to the Frenchman "for the sake of the _éclat_ it may give you. The stupid English public, which has no judgment of its own, will begin to think there is something in it if the French make your works national property. You have long lain under a mistake; men do not purchase pictures because they admire them, but because others covet them."
Finally, the "Hay Wain" was sold to the French dealer for £250, and Constable threw in a picture of Yarmouth for good measure. Later a friend declared that he had created a good deal of argument about landscape painting, and that there had come to be two divisions, for he had practically founded a new school. He received a gold medal for the "Hay Wain," and the French nation tried to buy it. In the Louvre are "The Cottage," "Weymouth Bay," and "The Glebe Farm." Elsewhere are "Hampstead Heath," "Salisbury Cathedral," "The Lock on the Stour," "Dedham Mill," "The Valley Farm," "Gillingham Mill," "The Cornfield," "Boat-Building," "Flatford Mill on the River Stour," besides many others.
A little boy with a squirrel was the first picture that pointed this artist toward fame and that was painted in England and exhibited at the Society of Arts.
This American-born Irishman had no family or ancestry of account, but he himself was to become the father of Lord Chancellor Lyndhurst, and he did some truly fine things in art.
About the same time America had another painter, Benjamin West, marked out for fame, but he got his start in Europe while Copley had already become a successful artist before he left Boston, his native place.