Cloud Study

ca. 1821

Oil on paper laid on card, 20.3 × 27.3 cm. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

Grey storm clouds pile up over a low strip of land, painted at speed on a small sheet of paper. Earlier catalogues gave it longer titles that also named the landscape and its trees.

Made on Hampstead Heath, outside London, as private study and never meant as a finished work.
Look at the trees, a dark silhouette at lower left, leaving most of the sheet to the sky.
He called this practice skying; notes on the back record the time, the direction he faced, the wind and the weather.
Studies like this taught him how skies actually form and move, from life rather than from older pictures. Wiggins (National Gallery) notes that weather experts can name the cloud types in his paintings.
Came to Yale with Paul Mellon's collection of British art.

Oil sketch: A quick painting in oil made to study a subject or plan a larger work, not to be sold or exhibited.

Image: Yale Center for British Art (open access) · CC0