Clouds

John Constable

Oil on paper on cardboard

Yale Center for British Art

This oil sketch belongs to the celebrated series of cloud studies that John Constable produced at Hampstead Heath, north of London, in 1821 and 1822, in a practice he called "skying." Executed rapidly en plein air in oils on paper laid on cardboard, the work captures the dynamic, ever-shifting character of the sky with a directness and meteorological precision unusual for its time. Constable, born in East Bergholt, Suffolk in 1776 and trained at the Royal Academy, approached landscape painting with a dual commitment to scientific observation and artistic feeling, famously regarding the sky as "the chief organ of sentiment" in any landscape composition. The Hampstead cloud studies stand among the most innovative works of British Romanticism, anticipating later developments in plein air painting and attesting to Constable's conviction that the sky was the keynote and governing source of light in nature.