Study of Cirrus Clouds

In 1802 an amateur meteorologist in London called Luke Howard gave clouds the Latin names we still use, cirrus, cumulus, stratus, and turned the sky into something that could be sorted and studied. 20 years later Constable was living up at Hampstead, north of London, and spent two summers doing almost nothing else but painting it. He called the practice skying. He made well over 100 of these small oil sketches on paper, and on the back of most of them he noted the date, the hour and the direction of the wind. On the back of this one he wrote a single word, cirrus. It is a little over 11 centimetres tall, and his daughter Isabel gave it to the museum in 1888.