All art treasures are prone to fabled accounts, none more pertinent to Anglo-French artistic relations of the 1820s than Constable's The Hay Wain. It is a familiar axiom, repeated incessantly, that after its prominent exhibition in Paris in the Salon of 1824, the so-called 'Salon anglais', the work became entrenched in art-historical lore as a singular icon that transformed French artistic sensibilities in landscape depiction, much to the regret of Ruskin. The influence that Constable's works in the exhibition had on French painters was noted for decades and was most emphatically expressed by the anglophile critic Ernest Chesneau, who paid homage specifically to The Hay Wain when he affirmed that the painting 'firent en France un effet extraordinaire' and that 'notre grande ecole de paysage modern se rattache directement a lui Constable'.