Cloud study

By 1821 Constable had moved his family up to Hampstead, the high ground north of London, and started doing something almost no painter had done before: painting the sky on its own, from life, with nothing else in the frame. He called it skying. Across two summers he made around fifty of these, sometimes more than one in a day, each in oil on paper in about an hour. What makes them feel almost scientific is the writing on the back. One is inscribed the fifth of September 1822, ten in the morning, looking south-east, a brisk west wind, grey clouds running fast over a yellow bed of sky. He wasn't selling them. He thought the sky set the whole mood of a landscape, and here he was teaching himself to get it right.