John Constable, from lectures at the Royal Institution (June 1836)

“...I am anxious that the world should be inclined to look to painters for information on painting. I hope to show that ours is a regularly taught profession; that it is scientific as well as poetic; that imagination alone never did, and never can, produce works that are to stand by a comparison with realities; and to show, by tracing the connecting links in the history of landscape painting, that no great painter was ever self-taught.”“…Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not landscape be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but experiments?”

Constable’s Study of Clouds at Hampstead, London

Study of Clouds, Ashmolean Museum

Clouds, 5 September 1822, National Gallery of Victoria

Road to ‘the Spaniards’, Hampstead, Philadelphia

Cloud study, horizon of trees 27 September 1821, Royal Academy of Arts, London

View from Hampstead Heath, looking towards Harrow, Manchester

Landscape with Clouds, New Art Gallery Walsall

Constable’s White Horse, New York

Constable’s Brighton Beach, Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Constable’s The Haywain, National Gallery, London

Bibliography

• Richard Hamblyn, The Invention of Clouds: How an Amateur Meteorologist Forged the Language of the Skies, the true story of Luke Howard. In 1803, Howard gave the clouds their names-cumulus, stratus, cirrostratus, cirrocumulus, and cirrus.

Copyright 2001.