Cloud Spotting with John Constable & Alfred Stieglitz
Constable's Year by Susan Owens (Thames & Hudson, 223 pages, $35)
Chasing Clouds at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Thru Feb. 28, 2027)
By Ed Voves Original photos by Anne Lloyd
On the evening of September 12, 1821, John Constable painted a dramatic view of the sunset over Hampstead Heath.
Constable was working outdoors. He used a palette loaded with dabs of oil paint, rather than his water color box, to create Hampstead Heath, looking toward Harrow at Sunset.
John Constable, Hampstead Heath, looking toward Harrow at Sunset, 1821
In this remarkable painting, Constable reversed the order of priority of sky and ground in landscape painting. The dramatic sky above is accorded the starring role. The soil beneath Constable's feet - and of the barely visible people traveling on the path in the foreground - is almost an afterthought.Constable would later write of this shift of perspective. "It will be difficult to name a class of landscape in which the sky is not the key note," Constable affirmed, "the standard of scale and the chief organ of sentiment.”
With this remark, John Constable, born 250 years ago, launched a hugely significant dialog with nature. In due course, our perception of the world around - and above - us would change. Constable's "refocus" continued to resonate in works by John Singer Sargent and Alfred Stieglitz over a century later.
In this Art Eyewitness essay, I will comment on a new book from Thames & Hudson, Constable's Year by Susan Owens, a former curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum and author of a superb history of drawing. Then, we will shift our focus to the just-opened exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, Chasing Clouds.
To these insightful surveys, several photos by my wife, Anne, will be added, showing how sky and clouds can continue to strike an artistic "key note" - even when the vantage point is a studio or bedroom window.
By the standards of the early nineteenth century, Constable's Hampstead Heath, mentioned above, was an oil sketch, not a finished work. Painting in the open air on the following day, September 13, 1821, Constable looked-up again at the clouds swirling overhead. Then, he made a very bold decision.
Constable decided to paint the sky.
No distant horizon line. No misty mountains. No path through the forest. Just sky and clouds, very accurately depicted and scientifically classified. Constable entitled his first "skyscape", Study of altocumulus clouds.
On the back of this oil on paper, Constable jotted the following notation,"13 September 1821. one o'clock. Slight wind at North West, which became tempestuous in the afternoon, With Rain all the night following."
During the remainder of the early autumn of 1821, Constable continued to paint oil sketches of the cloud-laden skies. As Susan Owens points out in Constable's Year, autumn, with its fading colors and falling leaves, little appealed to Constable. The September skies, with their "peculiar tone and beauty" were a different matter.
A year later, again in September, he was back for another season of "skying" from his favorite vantage points on Hampstead Heath. Constable painted cloud-filled skies, until he could write to his friend, Archdeacon Fisher, "I am the man of clouds."
However, another Englishman of Constable's era was also directing his attention skyward. In 1803, an amateur scientist named Luke Howard (1772-1864) published An Essay on the Modification of Clouds. In this illustrated book, Howard defined and described the cloud types with terminology still in use today: Cirrus, Cumulus and Stratus.
Constable was certainly familiar with Howard’s cloud "modification" (which then meant classification). In many respects, he was more than ready to embrace such close study of nature as an integral facet of art. In an 1836 lecture, Constable asserted:
Painting is a science,
and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why then may not
landscape painting be considered as a branch of natural philosophy of which
pictures are but the experiments?
Constable's actual practice of art was notably less definitive. He remained more a man of sentiment, rather than a practitioner of "painting as a science."
Owen's book - compulsively readable, even for readers familiar with British art history - traces Constable's reactions to all four seasons of the year. Owens brilliantly correlates the annual rhythms of life in Regency England to Constable's creative efforts. Predictably, winter put him in a reflective, melancholy frame of mind.
Constable had a lot more on his mind than the weather when he looked at clouds.
During the last years of his life, Constable wrestled with issues of mortality and morality. Was the sky, merely a "standard of scale" or was it "the chief organ of sentiment?” In 1839, two years after his passing, science, in the shape of photography, seemed to settle the issue.
"From today, painting is dead," the artist Paul Delaroche exclaimed upon seeing one of the first photographs, a daguerreotype.
Delaroche's obituary for painting was premature, especially in regards to daguerreotypes. These one-of-a-kind pictures were produced from silver-coated sheets of copper, making them unsuitable for almost anything but portraits.
One of the most fascinating works of art in the Met's Chasing Clouds directly relates to the difficulties in trying to expand the range of early photography. In 1844, a pair of French "lensmen", Marie-Charles-Isidore Choiselat and Stanislas Ratel, took-up the challenge of creating a daguerreotype landscape.
The result of this experiment is little short of miraculous. The astonishing mirror image of the cottage is a masterpiece in its own right.
Yet, the daguerreotype of Choiselat and Ratel is an unsettling work. It is so focused on surface detail that there is little depth to the photo. And because of the slow exposure speed of daguerreotypes, not a trace of clouds can be seen. If any were in the sky at the time, these would have been moving too fast to be captured by Choiselat and Ratel!
For artists and the scientific-minded of the Romantic era, the allure of clouds was too great to be resisted. The process of photography was still in its adolescence, when Gustave Le Gray and Charles Marville successfully addressed the problem of focusing on landscape and skyscape.
Gustave Le Gray (1820-1884) approached this task by combining photographic negatives. This was a process already in use in studio photos, but Le Gray audaciously took it out-of-doors. Beginning in 1855, he took photos of the shoreline and the sky along France's Mediterranean coast, especially the seaport of Sète. He joined the negatives at the horizon line, almost seamlessly.
Images like The Great Wave earned Le Gray international acclaim. He had succeeded in creating photographs with expertly focused expanses of sky and of land & sea. Moreover, he was able to evoke the pictorial interest and emotional impact of paintings like Constable's Hadleigh Castle.
While Le Gray was preoccupied with his remarkable combination technique, Charles Marville took some time-off from photographing the architecture of Paris to do a little "cloud spotting" for himself.
Marville was anything but a "romantic" photographer. His eye for precision and expert camera work would earn him the commission from Napoleon III to document the demolition of vast swathes of old Paris by Baron Haussmann in order to make way for the boulevards and public spaces of the new "city of light" Paris.
Yet, Marville was intrigued by the masses of clouds he could see from the window of his studio on the rue Saint Dominique. With the dome of the hospital, Les Invalides, as the center point, Marville adjusted the camera lens to focus on the skies, leaving the lower reaches of the scene in shadow. Since the silhouette of Les Invalides was instantly recognizable, the photo succeeded without the need to combined negatives.
A year later, Marville tried again. This time, he achieved a more balanced focus of cloud structure and of architectural detail in the streets below. Given, the technology of the time, this ranks as one of the great achievements of early photography.
Both Le Gray and Marville were "pushing the envelope" of what was feasible for photographers during the 1850's. Though innovations in camera design and film quality were made later, a gulf continued to exist between vision and practice for much of the nineteenth century.
As Chasing Clouds at the Met shows, photography did not kill painting, even when it came to depicting clouds. Many artists continued to follow Constable's lead and kept painting the skies above.
One of my favorites in the Chasing Clouds exhibition is a watercolor by John Singer Sargent. Sargent's Clouds was painted in 1897, exactly one year before a major technological innovation which would change photography and cloud spotting forever.
A new hand-held camera, the Graflex single-lens-reflex, was introduced by the Folmer and Schwing Manufacturing Company of New York City in 1898. Though bulky-looking to modern eyes, the Graflex had a rapid-shutter speed and portability that Gustave Le Gray and Charles Marville could only have dreamed of using.
In the hands of a skilled photographer, the Graflex was capable of producing masterpiece-caliber pictures. In the hands of Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946), it did.
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Stieglitz used a Graflex to create his iconic The Steerage in 1907. A decade and a half later, Stieglitz tilted his Graflex upward and began taking cloud photos. Initially, he called this series, Music - a Sequence of Ten Cloud Photographs. Then, as the number of cloud photos escalated, the title was changed to Equivalents.
Stieglitz prints of the Equivalent photos are prized possessions of a number of American art museums. But they cannot be shown on a long-term basis. Thus, Metropolitan Museum is doing art lovers a great service by presenting twenty-one Equivalents for their close inspection. Opportunities like this do not often occur.
In a short essay, published in 1923, Stieglitz explained his motivation for taking cloud photos:
I wanted to photograph clouds to find out what I had learned in 40 years about photography. Through clouds to put down my philosophy of life—to show that my photographs were not due to subject matter—not to special trees, or faces, or interiors, to special privileges—clouds were there for everyone.
Thus, in looking toward the clouds, Stieglitz was grappling with Constable's dilemma. When depicting the skies, is the artist's goal to establish a "standard of scale" or to gain access to "the chief organ of sentiment?”
Stieglitz' answer was one of ironclad certainty, nothing is "due to subject matter... clouds were there for everyone."
Perhaps unconsciously, this assertion provides a clue for the way that the clouds became less-and-less identifiable and the images more cryptic as the Equivalent series evolved. Some of the cloud-filled skies look the ripples in a stream of water or a crust of ice on a frosted window in winter.
Other photos bore little resemblance to anything, including clouds. This ambiguity would lead to applause for Stieglitz from the connoisseurs of modern art and the embrace of the Equivalents as an important addition to the growing body of Abstract art.
Stieglitz' effort to use cloud study to open a portal to personal feelings and insights was certainly a heroic endeavor. It took place over an extended period, 1922 to 1931. Over four hundred sky and cloud photos were taken, some of which were quickly presented in exhibitions such as Seven Americans in 1925 at the Anderson Galleries in New York. Others were not published or exhibited until many years later.
Stieglitz' cloud photography was something of an on-going venture during his lifetime. Might we then interpret the Equivalents as an open-ended, never officially closed endeavor? Might we not add some of our own renderings of the ethereal realm above our heads?
Here to answer these questions and to conclude our essay is a selection of Anne's cloud studies.
Text: Copyright of Ed Voves, all rights
reserved
Original photography, copyright of Anne
Lloyd, all rights reserved
Book Cover of Constable’s Year by Susan Owens Courtesy of Thames & Hudson
Promotional
Image for the Chasing Clouds
exhibition, Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC
The Equivalent photos by Alfred Stieglitz,
used in this review, are from the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.
These are comparable to those on display in the Metropolitan Museum’s
exhibition, Chasing Clouds. The Met’s
Stieglitz photos are currently embargoed for use in Internet articles and
reviews.
Introductory Image:
Anne Lloyd,
Photo (2014) A cloud study made at Haworth,
Yorkshire, UK, near the Bronte Parsonage Museum.
John Constable Hampstead Heath, looking toward Harrow at Sunset, 1821 Oil on paper: 24.1 x 29.8 cm. (9 ½ x 11 ¾ in.) Private collection.
Courtesy
of Thames & Hudson
Ramsay Richard Reinagle, Portrait of John Constable, c.1799
Oil on canvas: 76.2 cm × 63.8 cm (30.0 in × 25.1 in)
National Portrait Gallery, London.
Anne Lloyd, Photo (2026) Studio Window Skyscapes, 2026.
John Constable, Study of
altocumulus clouds, September 13, 1821. Oil on paper: 24.8 x 30.3 cm. (9
7/8 x 11 ½ in.) Yale Center for British Art. B1981.25.156
John Constable, Cloud Study, September 25, 1821. Oil on
paper: 24.8 x 30.3 cm. (9 7/8 x 11 ½ in.) Yale Center for British Art.
B1981.25.156 Courtesy of Thames & Hudson
John Constable, Hadleigh Castle, 1829. Oil on canvas: 122 x
164.5 cm. (48 1/8 x 64 7/8 in.) Yale Center for British Art. B1977.4.42Courtesy
of Thames & Hudson
Marie-Charles-Isidore
Choiselat & Stanislas Ratel, Landscape, 1844. Daguerreotype: 16.4 x 21.7 cm (6 7/16 x 8 9/16
in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art. #1994.417J
Gustave Le Gray, The Great Wave, Sète, 1857. Albumen silver print from two glass negatives: 33.7 x 41.4 cm (13
1/4 x 16 5/16 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art. #1976.646
Charles Marville, Cloud Study, Paris (top) 1855-56. Albumen silver print from glass
negative: 15.4 x 21 cm (6 1/16 x 8 1/4 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art. #2005.100.353; (below) 1856-57. Albumen silver print from glass negative: 16.7 x 20.6 cm (6 9/16 x
8 1/8 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art. #1987.1094
John Singer Sargent, Clouds,
1897. Watercolor on white wove paper: 35.6 x 25.2 cm. (19 x 9 15/16 in.)
Metropolitan Museum of Art #50.130.30
Clara Sipprell, Alfred Stieglitz,
1932. Gelaton Silver Print: Image Sheet: 22.3 x 17.6 cm. (8 ¾ x 6 15/16 in.)
National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C. NPG 82.196
Alfred Stieglitz, Equivalent, 1924.Gelatin silver print: Image: 9.6 × 12.1 cm (3 13/16 × 4 13/16
in.); Paper: 10.1 × 12.7 cm (4 × 5 in.): Art Institute of Chicago. Alfred
Stieglitz Collection. #1949.793
Alfred Stieglitz, Equivalent, 1926. Gelatin
Silver print. Image: 11.9 × 9.3 cm (4 11/16 × 3 11/16 in.) Art Institute of
Chicago. Alfred Stieglitz Collection. #1949.809
Alfred Stieglitz, Equivalent,
1926. Gelatin Silver print: Image: 11.6 × 9.2 cm (4 5/8 × 3
5/8 in.)Art Institute of Chicago. Alfred Stieglitz Collection. #1949.809
Anne Lloyd, Photos. Sky & Cloud
Studies, 2022, 2024 & 2025
Anne Lloyd, Photo (2025) November
Clouds, 2025.
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