Ruskin gives feint praise and much criticism to Constable in the second edition of Modern Painters I. Criticism continued in Modern Painters III (1856) and in the Appendix to that volume where Constable is seen as 'giving countenance to the blotting and blundering of Modernism.' ( Works, 5.423). In Modern Painters IV, (1856) Ruskin discusses a tree drawing by Constable used as the frontispiece of Leslie, Memorials of the Life of John Constable (1845) where he comments that in the drawing of the aspen 'we have arrived at the point of total worthlessness... wholly false in ramification, idle, and undefined in every respect' ( Works, 4.101). Further criticism of Constable can be found in an Appendix to The Two Paths (1859), were Ruskin suggests:
There was, perhaps, the making in Constable of a second or third-rate painter... But he is nothing more than an industrious and innocent amateur blundering his way to a superficial expression of one or two popular aspects of common nature. ( Works, 16.415).
Criticism continued in Lectures on Landscape (1871) where Constable along with Cox:
represent a form of blunt and untrained faculty which in being very frank and simple, apparently powerful, and yet needing no thought or intelligence or trouble whatever to observe, therein meeting with instant sympathy from the disorderly public mind now resentful of every trammel and ignorant of every law - these two men, I say represent in their intensity the qualities adverse to all accurate science or skill in landscape art; their work being the mere blundering of clever peasants, and deserving no name whatever in any school of true practice ( Works, 22.58).
Ruskin was also antagonistic towards Constable's success in France. (see Ruskin on Constable's influence upon the French school).