John Constable

In the work of John Constable the cloud studies form a compact group on their own. The most important of them were painted in the years 1821-2. In his letters of September and October 1821 Constable was writing 'I have done a good deal of skying'; and he mentioned among his current works 'many skies, effects of lights, noble clouds'.

Most of his cloud studies seem to have been painted in 1822, however, as John Constable reported (on October 7), 'I made about fifty careful studies of skies, tolerably large to be careful'. Leslie, who was probably the first to see them, felt at once how extraordinary these studies were. He has told us that 'twenty of Constable's studies of skies made during this season were in his possession'; and he said 'there is not one among them in which a vestige of landscape is introduced. They are painted in oil, on large sheets of thick paper, and all dated with the time of day, the direction of the wind, and other memoranda on their backs. On one, for instance, is written "5th of September, 1822, 10 o'clock, morning, looking south-cast, brisk wind at west. Very bright and fresh grey clouds running fast over a yellow bed, about half way in the sky. Very appropriate to the Coast at Osmington." '

But John Constable also painted cloud studies which contain at least a narrow strip of earth, - one might say, landscapes with unusually, indeed impossibly low horizons in which the earth is used like the base of a statue, as a firm foothold or as a contrast to the forms of the sky; or else he chose a view of a close horizon, formed by groups of trees, behind the tops of which the clouds climb into the sky, intending unmistakably to solve the problem of space and to express the contrast between the heaviness of the masses of foliage and the lightness of the shapes hovering in the atmosphere. The main interest, nevertheless, is still concentrated in the sky which also takes up most of the space. There is no possible doubt that these are in fact cloud studies.

This group of studies he painted at one go, in one concentrated effort as if by a special inspiration, as the outcome of some special experience or motive; their quality is such that they take a place of. their own within the total output of the master, as compared with the other cloud and sky studies which he did in earlier and later years.

John Constable undertook these studies as preparatory to his 'big' pictures - the 'six-feet canvas' as he called them, because of the difficulties which he had found in the 'composition and execution' of skies, as an exercise for the sight, the memory, and the imagination.

Now one look at John Constable's landscapes and those of his contemporaries (including Turner) is enough to see that he was in a special class of his own as far as sky-painting was concerned. Constable took a more serious interest in the matter than the others. That explains the studies as such. But the striking and most remarkable thing about them is that they actually succeeded in being more than he intended them to be.

If one attempts to divide John Constable's works into those four groups into which the work of most painters can be divided, one finds an almost embarrassing difficulty. With Constable the relations between the first draft, the sketch, the study and the finished work are no longer what such relations used to be in the output of the old masters. The intellectual process which unites them is different. Some of the studies seem to have been made without any artistic interest, some can hardly be distinguished from a first draft and a sketch, whilst the finished pictures do not seem to be in line with the preparatory sketches at all.