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Creator:
John Constable, 1776–1837
Title:

Cloud Study [2007, Paul Mellon's Legacy: a Passion for British Art: Masterpieces from the Yale Center for British Art, exhibition catalogue]

Former Title(s):

Stratocumulus Cloud [1984, Reynolds, The later paintings and drawings of John Constable, catalogue raisonné]

Date:
1821
Medium:
Oil on paper laid on board
Dimensions:
9 3/4 x 11 7/8 inches (24.8 x 30.2 cm), Frame: 13 1/2 × 15 5/8 × 1 3/8 inches (34.3 × 39.7 × 3.5 cm)
Credit Line:
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
Copyright Status:
Public Domain
Accession Number:
B1981.25.155
Classification:
Paintings
Collection:
Paintings and Sculpture
Link to Frame:
B1981.25.155FR
Subject Terms:
birds | blue | brush strokes | clouds | flat | gray | meteorology | motion | science | study (visual work) | texture | white
Access:
Not on view
Note: To make an appointment to see this work, please contact the Paintings and Sculpture department at ycba.paintings@yale.edu. Please visit the Paintings and Sculpture collections page on our website for more details.
Link:
https://collections.britishart.yale.edu/catalog/tms:666
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John Constable made his cloud studies in a concentrated burst of activity while living in Hampstead, north London, in the early 1820s. It was the first time he had devoted himself exclusively to skies, even though he had been painting directly from nature since 1802. The inscriptions on some of these cloud studies indicate that they took at least an hour to paint, and he seems to have used a specially prepared paper fitted to the lid of his paint box. As Constable explained at the end of his career: “I am greatly mistaken if every landscape painter will not acknowledge that his most serene hours have been spent in open air, with his palette in his hand.” Nevertheless, no painting, however rapidly worked, can capture something as transient as a cloud, and these studies should be seen as the result of Constable’s long contemplation of skies rather than as straightforward renderings of actual passing cloud formations.

Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2022


Constable's cloud studies represent one of the most original aspects of his evolving approach to the art of landscape painting. He painted them in the open air, recording precisely the weather conditions, topographical orientation and time of day that each study was completed. This approach to the specificity of nature, recorded before the motif, was one of Constable's most important contribution to the development of art. What makes the present cloud study unusual is the strip of landscape along the bottom margin of the panel, and the birds wheeling and looping through the sky. These two elements create a sense of foreground and background that is missing from the more abstract cloud studies.

Gallery label for Paul Mellon's Legacy: A Passion for British Art (Yale Center for British Art, 2007-04-18 - 2007-07-29)
Constable’s cloud studies represent perhaps one of the most original and surprising aspects of his evolving approach to the art of landscape painting. This exquisite example is in several respects unusual. Unlike numbers of other bona fide cloud studies—the product of hours of plein-air work on Hampstead Heath in 1821 and 1822, together with gradually lengthening sets of notes in which Constable recorded on each the weather conditions, topographical orientation, and the time of day—a narrow strip of “landscape” is clearly indicated along the bottom margin of the panel, and birds wheel and swoop in what is in effect a foreground that elsewhere consists entirely of void and energy, the intangible space held in by clouds scudding far overhead.

Michael Rosenthal has noted the congruence of the larger Romanticism of Constable’s strong feeling for skies and also the regulation of light in the landscape by the predictable behavior and motion of specific kinds of cloud, with lines from “Prelude VI,” by Wordsworth, that appear to reflect a comparable and quintessentially Romantic outlook:

“The unfettered clouds and regions of
the Heavens,
Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light—
Were all like workings of one mind, the features
Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree:
Characters of the great Apocalypse,
The types and symbols of Eternity"
(cited in Rosenthal, 1983, p. 167).

Angus Trumble

John Baskett, Paul Mellon's Legacy: a Passion for British Art: Masterpieces from the Yale Center for British Art, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 2007, pp 287-8, no. 98, pl. 98, N5220 M552 P38 2007 OVERSIZE (YCBA)
Created by John Constable (1776-1837), the artist, on September 28, 1821; by descent to his daughter, Isabel Constable (1822-1888) [1]; … ; acquired by Camille Groult (1832-1908), Paris [2]; by descent to his son, Jean Groult (1868-1951), Paris [3]; by descent to his son, Pierre Bordeaux-Groult (1916-2007), Paris [4]; privately purchased by Paul Mellon (1907-1999), 1965; by whom given to the Yale Center for British Art, 1981. [a]

Notes:

[1] Grosvenor Gallery exhibited the artwork (cat. no. 238) in 1889. The catalog states it was "Lent by the Executors of the Late Miss Isabel Constable." The catalog incorrectly gives the year of the sketch, but accurately reproduces Constable's inscription and the work's dimensions. See A Century of British Art, (London: Henry Good & Son, 1889), 99-102, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/gri.ark:/13960/t5v73275v

[2] French art collector and heir to a flour-milling family. Began collecting English paintings ca. 1890 from dealers in London, such as Dowdeswell and Dowdeswell. See Grove Art Online, s.v., "Groult, Camille," by Stephane Loire, https://doi.org/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.article.T035112; and "La Collection Groult," L'Illustration 66, no. 3386 (1908): 49-56, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/ucbk.ark:/28722/h2dg8q?urlappend=%3Bseq=59

[3] No Constable paintings were sold in the anonymous Camille Groult sale of 1920, suggesting they remained in Jean Groult's collection until his death. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k320715g

[4] No Constable paintings are invoked in Jean Groult's 1952 sale, suggesting they remained in the family until Paul Mellon's purchase in 1965. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000289429

Citations:

[a] Graham Reynolds, The later paintings and drawings of John Constable (New Haven: Yale University Press, New Haven, 1984), 1:83, no. 21.57, https://collections.britishart.yale.edu/catalog/orbis:582470

The Triumph of Landscape - Turner to Monet (National Gallery of Australia, 2008-03-14 - 2008-06-09) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition]

An American's Passion for British Art - Paul Mellon's Legacy (Royal Academy of Arts, 2007-10-20 - 2008-01-27) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition]

An American's Passion for British Art - Paul Mellon's Legacy (Yale Center for British Art, 2007-04-18 - 2007-07-29) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition]

Canaletto to Constable: Paintings of Town and Country from the Yale Center for British Art (Ferrara Galleries of Modern & Contemporary Art, 2001-02-25 - 2001-05-20) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition]

Canaletto to Constable: Paintings of Town and Country from the Yale Center for British Art (The Grand Rapids Art Museum, 1999-10-22 - 2000-01-02) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition]

Canaletto to Constable: Paintings of Town and Country from the Yale Center for British Art (Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, 1998-02-08 - 1998-04-26) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition]

Gentle, Rural and Sublime - English Landscape Paintings and Watercolors, 1750-1850 (Denver Art Museum, 1993-12-11 - 1994-02-06) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition]

John Constable (Tate) (Tate Britain, 1991-06-13 - 1991-09-15) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition]

John Constable - A Selection of Paintings from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon (National Gallery of Art, 1969-04-30 - 1969-11-01) [YCBA Objects in the Exhibition]

Katharine Baetjer, Glorious nature, British landscape painting, 1750-1850 , Zwemmer publisher, London, 1993, pp. 31, 196-7, no. 58, ND1354.4 B34 1993 (YCBA) [YCBA]

John Baskett, Paul Mellon's Legacy: a Passion for British Art: Masterpieces from the Yale Center for British Art, , Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 2007, pp 287-8, no. 98, pl. 98, N5220 M552 P38 2007 OVERSIZE (YCBA) [YCBA]

Charlotte Burns, Key Lots, Old Masters , The Art Newspaper, vol. 19, July/August 2010, p. 48, Available online at Art Full Text (H.W. Wilson) Also available at the Lewis Walpole Library. [ORBIS]

Canaletto to Constable : paintings of town and country from the Yale Center for British Art, , Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Conn., 1998, pp. 17-18, 107, pl. 41, ND1354.4 Y25 1998 (YCBA) [YCBA]

Malcolm Cormack, Concise Catalogue of Paintings in the Yale Center for British Art, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 1985, pp. 60-61, N590.2 A83 (YCBA) [YCBA]

Christine Dixon, Turner to Monet, the triumph of landscape painting , National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Seattle, WA, 2008, pp. 66-7, cat. 11, ND1349.5 D59 2008 + (YCBA) [YCBA]

Mark Evans, Constable's Skies: Paintings and Sketches by John Constable, Thames & Hudson, New York, New York, p. 66-67, fig. 26, NJ18.C74 E93 2018 (LC) (YCBA) [YCBA]

Luke Herrmann, Nineteenth century British painting, Giles de la Mare, London, 2000, p. 129, col. pl. 25, ND467 H47 2000 (YCBA) [YCBA]

Robert Hoozee, L'opera completa di Constable, 98, Rizzoli, Milano, Italy, 1979, p. 118, no, 309, NJ18 C74 A12 +H66 (YCBA) [YCBA]

Mary Jacobus, Cloud studies : The visible invisible, Gramma : Journal of Theory and Culture, vol. 14, Accessed February 11, 2023, pp. 238-9, fig. 6, Freely Accessible Arts & Humanities Journals [ORBIS]

John Constable : a selection of paintings from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, , National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 1969, pp. 42-43, no. 43, NJ18 C74 U5 (YCBA) [YCBA]

Leslie Parris, Constable : pictures from the exhibition, , Tate Publishing, London, UK, 1991, p. 43, pl. 39, NJ18 C74 P373 1991 (YCBA) [YCBA]

Leslie Parris, Constable, Tate Publishing, London, UK, 1991, pp. 230-1, no. 121, pl. 121, NJ18 C74 P372 1991 + (YCBA) [YCBA]

Paul Mellon's Legacy : a passion for British art [large print labels], , Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 2007, v. 3, N5220 M552 P381 2007 OVERSIZE (YCBA) [YCBA]

Graham Reynolds, The later paintings and drawings of John Constable, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1984, p. 83 (v. 1), no. 21.57, pl. 262, NJ18 C74 R485 + (YCBA) [YCBA]

Michael Rosenthal, Constable, the painter and his landscape, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1983, p. 167, NJ18 C74 R68 OVERSIZE (YCBA) [YCBA]

Peter D. Smith, Constable, Crown Publishers, New York, 1981, p. 49, NJ18 C74 S64 + (YCBA) [YCBA]

Basil Taylor, Constable : paintings, drawings and watercolours, , Phaidon, London, UK, 1973, p. 199, note 30, no. 63, NJ18 C74 T39 + (YCBA) [YCBA]

The Grosvenor Gallery Winter Exhibition 1889 : A second series of a century of British art from 1737 to 1837, Accessed January 10, 2023, p. 100, no. 238, HathiTrust [ORBIS]

John E. Thornes, John Constable's skies : a fusion of art and science, , University of Birmingham Press, Birmingham, UK, 1999, pp. 238-39, no. 23, pl. 105, NJ18 C74 T56 1999 (YCBA) [YCBA]

William Vaughan, John Constable, Tate Publishing, London, 2002, pp. 58, 60, no. 52, NJ18 C74 V28 2002 (YCBA) [YCBA]

William Vaughan, John Constable, Tate Publishing, London, 2015, pp. 76-78, fig. 52, NJ18.C74 V28 2015 (YCBA) [YCBA]

Pierre Wat, Constable: entre ciel et terre, Herscher, Paris, 1994, pp. 42-3, NJ18 C74 W36 1994 [ORBIS]

Giles Waterfield, Mr. Mellon, RA : the magazine for the Friends of the Royal Academy, No. 96, Autumn 2007, pp. 68-69, V 1905 (YCBA) [YCBA]


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