Cumulus, stratus, cirrus, nimbus.
Objects with these strange names affect our lives in many ways. Like a bucket overfilled with water, they pour out rain and snow; with the wind as their partner, they whip up tornadoes and hurricanes; in a pile of styles and sizes, they dress up a clear sky. Like a mother’s arms, they encircle the land with protection and love. We call them clouds.
Tools and Techniques for the Outdoors
Constable painted clouds and the natural world he saw in the Suffolk region of England. He usually painted outside to capture clouds of all shapes and under all conditions, and his tools and techniques prepared him for this task.When he painted out of doors, he carried with him four palettes, a wooden sketching box with brushes, a chalk holder, a palette knife, and pigments in glass phials; the phials were used before paint tubes were available. He packed a lump of white gypsum, which he used for drawing as well as roughening the paper.
Constable glued three pieces of paper together and primed this card with a colored “ground,” which made it somewhat water-resistant. To catch ever-changing scenes of light and movement, Constable often mixed the colors right on the surface of the paper, rather than mixing on the palette and then transferring the paint.
Constable painted more than 50 oil sketches of cloud formations. For his outdoor work, he used an impasto technique (broad and naturalistic brushstrokes) to catch the swiftly changing weather. He favored natural tones to match the true colors of the landscape, unlike past conventions that used “coffee” colors in landscape painting.
Oil Sketches Capture Movement and Light
The artist made sketches of weather changes throughout the day. In his oil sketch of cirrus clouds, he made the wind visible as it whisks the clouds around. The background shows various shades of blue shifting to gray. There are streaks of clouds, not enough for rain but enough to rouse the bigger clouds above.Some of the larger cloud formations are touched with gray at their base to indicate the beginning of a rain cloud. In the lower register, Constable showed touches of light for more distant clouds. A lot is happening in the sky with only a cluster of whiteness.
His “Cloud Study” gives us a tumultuous sky and not the usual perception of “cloudy.” It appears active with a great mix of colors: white, gray, blue, and even touches of gold where the sun might be shining through.
In his oil sketch “Brighton Beach,” Constable managed to show the buildup of a storm. Wind-swept cloud formations have now coalesced into rumbling behemoths. The billowing grayness packs a skyful of rain. Very soon, the rain clouds will completely block the last of the light sky. Some smaller gray clouds reflect the last light before the storm. The base of the sketch supports in tones of brown.
In another oil sketch made at Brighton Beach, titled “Rainstorm Over the Sea” (1822), dark gray rain drops heavily to the water from a cloud higher than what is seen. Clouds on the left are blue-black with rain about to crash down. This is a localized rainfall, as seen by the light clouds in the background. These dark clouds will drop heavy rain but it will end soon.
In “Cumulus Clouds Over a Landscape,” the storm has passed as quickly as it arrived. Dark clouds move away as the storm passes into the upper left of the sketch, as larger cumulus clouds fill the skyline. To the right, the light of a setting (or rising) sun dots the clouds that are swiftly moved along by its companion, the wind.
‘Six-Footers’
Constable made his oil sketches of the stratosphere not as an end in themselves, but to prepare for the actual work of large landscape paintings. He did a series of full-size landscape paintings, known as “six-footers,” of places in Suffolk. On these paintings, his firmament shines.“The White Horse” was the first of these large works. According to contemporary artist Charles Robert Leslie, it was “on many accounts the most important picture Constable ever painted because it provided him the financial freedom to paint what he wanted.” In 1819, it earned him a place in England’s Royal Academy of the Arts.
Beloved Landscapes
Constable’s seemingly simple scenes have become highly valued. In November 2021, ArtNews reported that a painting, called “The Glebe Farm,” which was once considered a Constable copy, has been verified as an original. It sold last year in Cincinnati for $54,000; the landscape is to be auctioned at Sotheby’s with a low estimate of $4.03 million!Clouds of One’s Own
Landscape artists enable people to muse, consider, and reflect on the world. Many who view Constable’s landscape paintings look at their own backyards and feel bathed in serenity and happiness.
