A Curatorial Perspective on Two Objects

John Constable’s landscape View on the Stour Near Dedham is indicative of a larger artistic movement in the nineteenth century which aimed to illustrate the reality of the natural world rather than an idealized, imagined landscape, a tendency that had dominated the art of previous centuries. Constable aspired to make his art equally scientific and poetic; he strove for his paintings to reflect natural phenomena as accurately as possible, and hoped that they would also elicit an emotional response in his viewers. He supported his belief that “painting is a science and should be pursued as an enquiry into the laws of nature,” by reading the work of pioneering meteorologists. Constable is known today especially for his careful rendering of clouds and skies within his larger landscape paintings, and for his numerous cloud studies (paintings which only show clouds and skies). He worked on these studies outside, famously on Hampstead Heath (a hilly spot in North London where his views were less obstructed) and made careful meteorological notes in the field. His paintings are so accurate that meteorologists today can make inferences about the weather conditions he painted in.

Thomas Forster’s Researches About Atmospheric Phenomenon was one of the first works on meteorology to explain rather than just describe weather phenomena. The frontispiece to this work illustrates various cloud types, and labels them with recently-established nomenclature. Forster was a student of meteorologist Luke Howard, a contemporary of John Constable, who established cloud names using a Linnean classification system. Howard’s nomenclature of cloud types is still used in meteorology today. Constable likely studied Howard’s publications, and we know that he owned a copy of Forster’s Researches About Atmospheric Phenomenon (which is still extant in the Constable family library). He studied the book closely, filling the margins with annotations referring back to Luke Howard.

Exhibition page.