Study of Cloudy Sky

John Constable

Oil on paper

Yale Center for British Art

This oil sketch belongs to John Constable's celebrated series of cloud studies executed during his residence in Hampstead, north London, in 1821 and 1822, where he made approximately one hundred studies of the sky in a practice he called 'skying.' Working directly from nature in the open air, Constable painted rapidly in oils on paper, capturing the transient effects of light, atmosphere, and cloud formations with scientific precision and expressive immediacy. Born in East Bergholt, Suffolk, in 1776, Constable was one of Britain's foremost Romantic landscape painters, who regarded the sky as, in his own words, 'the source of light in nature' and 'the chief organ of sentiment' in landscape painting. These cloud studies are now recognised as pioneering works in the history of Western landscape art, anticipating the atmospheric naturalism of the French Barbizon School and the Impressionists.