On the last Sunday before the start of autumn, this week’s picture is John Constable’s fresh and exhilarating study of clouds scudding through the sky above his lodgings in Hampstead. He painted it some time shortly after 10 o’clock on the morning of 11 September 1821, scribbling a note of the weather conditions on its reverse: “Morning under the sun – Clouds silvery grey … Light wind to the SW, fine all day – but rain the following evening.” There had been rain the day before too, when he had been forced to stop work due to “large drops of rain on my palette.”

Notwithstanding such trials and interruptions the beginning of autumn was one of the painter’s favourite times of year, a season when the world was apt to seem refreshed and reinvigorated after the sleepy torpor of high summer: “silvery, windy and delicious,” in Constable’s own words, “all health, and the absence of everything stagnant.” These were qualities that he yearned to capture in his landscape paintings, but at the start of the 1820s he felt that his art was failing to fulfil his ambitions for it. The chief problem, in his view, was his handling of skies. He embarked on a prolonged campaign of study, producing numerous oil sketches of clouds and their movements. Constable explained his motives in a fascinating letter to his best friend, Archdeacon John Fisher, dated October 23, 1821:

“That landscape painter who does not make his skies a very material part of his composition, neglects to avail himself of one of his greatest aids. Sir Joshua Reynolds, speaking of the landscapes of Titian, of Salvator and of Claude, says: ‘Even their skies seem to sympathise with their subjects. I have often been advised to consider my sky as ‘a white sheet thrown behind the objects.’ Certainly, if the sky is obtrusive, as mine are, it is bad; but if it is evaded, as mine are not, it is worse; it must and always shall with me make an effectual part of the composition. It will be difficult to name a class of landscape in which the sky is not the key note, the standard of scale, and the chief organ of sentiment.”

The study reproduced here shows a sky which is anything but “a white sheet”. Constable makes thin air palpable, capturing the evanescent drama of clouds in motion, their crests caught by the morning sun. Even the emptiest passages of blue sky express the direction and freshness of the wind in brushstrokes that sweep from right to left. The artist conveys space as well as movement, vividly indicating the broad extent of a sky traversed by streets of high-flying cumulus. The indeterminate grey cloud at the top left of the picture has been cleverly designed to seem spatially closer to the viewer than the trees down in the opposite corner. It appears overhead and to be moving out of view almost as we look. Constable was clearly pleased with what he had achieved in this quickfire plein-air study because he went on to transcribe several of its passages directly into one of his finished, studio oils.

Hampstead in the early nineteenth century was still a village, overlooking London. Its elevated setting and salubrious air suited Constable’s ailing wife who, like several of their neighbours, including the sickly young poet John Keats, suffered from weak lungs. Constable kept his studio in town, “three miles door to door”, but became increasingly glad of his rural bolthole. In the city the smogs of the industrial revolution often meant that the sky was all but invisible. In his letters the painter speaks of “the smoky vapour of London”, its “artificial fog”, through which the sun resembles “a pearl seen through burnt glass.”

 

Artists before his time had looked skywards for inspiration – Leonardo da Vinci counselled painters in search of arresting subjects to study the fantastical shapes formed by passing clouds – but none had done so with Constable’s blend of emotional engagement and empirical care. Typically, he was among the first painters to read and master the pioneering meteorological work of Luke Howard, deviser of the first useful classification of cloud forms (many of whose terms such as “cirrus”, “cumulus” and “cumulonimbus” remain in use today).

 

Constable’s youth in Suffolk may partly explain the attention he paid to the sky. The son of a prosperous corn and coal merchant, in whose footsteps it was hoped he would follow, he was trained from childhood to keep a watchful and businesslike eye on weather movements. He was taught to understand the significance of “messenger” clouds, harbingers of storms, and sometimes sent out on “skying” duty to watch for signs of high winds that might damage his father’s mills.

 

But the moral and spiritual meanings which Constable attributed to the heavens were even more important to him. Brought up as a devout Christian, he was influenced by the William Paley’s “natural theology” and wrote in his letters of moments when he believed God was revealing His presence through a show of natural beauty. These often coincided with autumnal weather like that depicted in the Hampstead studies – days of fast-moving cloud when sun and rain, warming light and life-giving water, seemed to pulse across the face of the world like a blessing.

 

Against all the preconceptions of his day, Constable considered landscape painting to be the noblest of vocations. According to prevailing academic convention landscape was the lowest genre, at the opposite end of the scale from grand narrative painting, because it told no story and exhibited no improving moral. To Constable, however, landscape painting was a form of grand narrative art, since it told the uplifting story of God’s presence on earth.