Cloud Study: Stormy Sunset

Constable painted the study rapidly and directly from nature in the open air, a practice he called skying. He applied oil to paper, a support that allowed him to work fluidly and dry more quickly than canvas would permit. The paint application varies from thick impasto in the darker clouds, built up with thick, swirling brushstrokes that convey weight and movement, to thinner, more blended passages in the luminous areas. Visible brushwork moves in multiple directions, including horizontal and circular sweeps, creating a sense of restless atmospheric motion. Colors were brushed on wet into wet with gusto, resulting in a restrained palette of muted blues, grays, browns, and soft warm tones. Despite the apparent spontaneity, the sketch is not a straightforward rendering of a passing cloud, but rather the result of the artist's long contemplation of skies.

The work descended to the artist's granddaughter, Ella Nafeeseh Constable Mackinnon, who sold a group of works by her grandfather through the dealer Leggatt to Sir Henry Newson-Smith in the 1890s. Sir Frank Newson-Smith inherited the sketches, which he found in an attic, and sold the painting at Christie, Manson & Woods in London on January 26, 1951, as A Stormy Sunset. Leggatt Gallery bought it at that sale, after which it passed through Thomas Agnew & Sons, a private collection, and Salander O'Reilly Galleries in New York. The National Gallery of Art purchased the work on February 23, 1998, accessioning it as 1998.20.1. Although Constable often annotated his sky studies with the date, time, wind direction, and cloud nomenclature, this work is not visibly annotated. Slight traces of pen strokes at the bottom of the image may be the tops of letters from an original annotation, trimmed off the sheet at an unknown later date.

Among early nineteenth-century artists, Constable was one of the most systematic students of the sky. He was acutely aware of contemporary scientific study, following developments in the recent science of meteorology, such as Luke Howard's seminal essay On the Modifications of Clouds, published serially in 1803 and reissued in The Climate of London in 1818, and Thomas Foster's Researches about Atmospheric Phenomena of 1812. Constable felt a thorough understanding of such natural phenomena would give his art greater truth to nature. He had been painting directly from nature since 1802, but his residence in Hampstead in the early 1820s marked the first time he devoted himself exclusively to skies. For him, these sketches were not works of art complete in themselves, but empirical research gathered in the field to better inform the naturalism of his finished exhibition pictures worked up in the studio. Toward the end of his life in the 1830s, his art became more emotionally charged, and he likely looked to these studies more for their expressiveness than their scientific content.

Constable's cloud studies have come to be appreciated as significant works in their own right, distinct from his more famous, busy landscape compositions. Art historian Ernst Gombrich noted that Constable refused to be more impressive than nature, and these studies illustrate how impressive nature in its simplest form can be. The work has been featured in major exhibitions, including Art for the Nation at the National Gallery of Art in 2000 and True to Nature: Open-Air Painting in Europe, 1780 to 1870, which traveled from Washington to Paris and Cambridge from 2020 to 2022. The painting continues to resonate with viewers, evoking personal memories of the vast, damp landscapes and open skies of the English fens, demonstrating the enduring emotional pull of Constable's meteorological observations.