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Constable, Clouds, Climate Change
Gillen D’Arcy Wood
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
“The weather is a nobler and more interesting subject, it is after this flurry of analysis, critics dispute Constable’s motiva- the present state of the skies and of the earth, on which tion for painting the Hampstead cloud studies, and their re- plenty and famine are suspended, on which millions depend lation to the contemporaneous “Hay Wain.” for the necessaries of life”—Samuel Johnson ( The Idler, June 24, 1758) (^) Thornes argues that Constable, stung by criticism of his six-footer skies, sought to redress the supposed defi- After exhibiting “The Hay Wain” at the Royal Academy ciency, to acknowledge the sky as “the chief ‘ Organ of Senti- Exhibition in the spring of 1821, Constable spent the sum- ment’ ” in landscape painting ( Correspondence 6:77). His mer on Hampstead Heath, producing oil sketches with a fo- success shows not only in the gorgeousness of the cloud stud- cus on the sky and cloud formations. In the autumn, he ies themselves, but the improvement in his formal paintings worked “more” on “The Hay Wain” (Figure 1), then re-sub- after 1821, in which “the achievement of balanced light gives mitted the painting to the British Institution exhibition in a freshness and realistic feeling... that is almost entirely early 1822. 1 That summer Constable returned to the Heath, lacking before 1821”(119). Timothy Wilcox, however, sees this time abandoning all representation of landscape in favor “more of the veracity and immediacy of the [sky] sketches” in of pure skyscapes. Constable hoped for commercial success Constable’s art after 1821-2, while an art-historical majority, from “The Hay Wain,” but the only customer was a French including Louis Hawes, Michael Rosenthal and Graham dealer, which was mortifying to the Tory Constable. By con- Reynolds, sees no improvement. 2 Anne Lyle points out, in trast, he never considered his skyscapes for exhibition or sale. addition, that Constable received at least as much praise as Almost two hundred years later, the cloud studies stand with blame for his skies prior to 1821, and that none of the fifty the iconic “Hay Wain” and the other Stour Valley “six-foot- surviving cloud studies appear to have been used as the basis ers” at the summit of Constable’s achievement. Two exhibi- for the sky in any of Constable’s subsequent paintings. In tions in the last decade were devoted to the Hampstead their sheer experimental variety, they “go far beyond what he skyscapes, and a weighty monograph, John Constable’s Skies might have needed for his large paintings.” 3 With that, the (1999), by a trained meteorologist, John Thornes. But even rationale for the cloud studies begins to fall apart. If Consta-
ble did not “need” the Hampstead studies, and they did not of the 1820s for which they were supposedly a preparation? “improve” his handling of skyscapes, what was their purpose? Where lies “the truth of skies” in Constable? (John Ruskin, And what is their relation to the commercial studio paintings Modern Painters [1851] I:201).
Figure 1: Landscape: Noon [“The Haywain”], 1821. The National Gallery, London
The art-historical debate vanishes with “The Hay swerable historically—there is too little information on what Wain.” For Thornes, it is the “watershed” painting, whose sky Constable did to the painting—and on the aesthetic issue of exemplifies Constable’s improved technique achieved “improvement,” opinion is divided. The question of the through the cloud studies. Louis Hawes agrees that “The Hay painterly quality of the sky of “The Hay Wain” rests between Wain” shows “master[y]” of the skyscape, which becomes evi- un-decidability and irrelevance: the threatening clouds giving dence for the contrary argument, that Constable “had al- way to the burst of sunshine that bathes the cart exemplify ready achieved a remarkable naturalism in the skies shortly either an improved or unimproved Constable sky, choice of before launching his skying campaign late in 1821” (360). which likewise determines one’s position regarding the cloud The issue here becomes one of dates. Constable first showed studies, as either belonging to a Kenneth Clark narrative of “The Hay Wain” in the spring of 1821. But just how much ever-improving naturalism in Constable’s technique, or did Constable revise the painting that autumn? Robert Hunt somewhere outside that narrative. of the Examiner celebrated the original 1821 sky “which for noble volume of cloud and clear light we have never at any (^) If the cloud studies have no home within Constable’s time seen exceeded except by Nature,” then, on seeing the (^) own career, if they were undertaken for no explicit reason, painting again at the British Institution the following March (^) and with no discernable effect on his art, the art-historical expressed “doubt whether Mr. Constable ha[d] improved” (^) reading which is opposed to Thornes, nevertheless, elevates the painting (Judy Crosby Ivy, Constable and the Critics, 1802- (^) their importance as well as Constable himself in the history 37 [1991] 88,92). (^) of modern European art. The French interest in “The Hay Wain” in 1821 led to its exhibition to great acclaim in Paris in Is the sky in “The Hay Wain” the product of a sum- 1824. Delacroix, famously, was inspired. The international- mer’s intensive masterclass in “skying” or does it owe nothing ization of Constable was renewed in earnest in the 1860s, to it, as Hunt’s reviews suggest? These questions are not an- with his recognized influence on the Barbizon school and
light he took in the representation of color and atmosphere: ment, food shortages, and labor unrest. In April, 1822, Con- “A cloudy or stormy day at noon with partial bright and hu- stable, discussing his problems selling “The Hay Wain,” refers mid gleam of light over meadow scenery, and near the banks unsympathetically to the plight of his fellow East Anglians: of rivers with trees, boats and building, are most desirable “My brother is uncomfortable about the state of things in Suf- objects with a painter, who delights in Colour and Light and folk. They are as bad as Ireland—‘never a night without see- Shade” ( Discourses 26). His fascination, in Michael Rosen- ing fires near or at a distance’... no abatement of tithes or thal’s words, was for “abstracted nature, seen in terms of es- rents” ( Correspondence 6:88). The angler in the bushes of “The sences, wind and light” (166). Whatever the abstract purity Hay Wain” might well be no sportsman, but rather seeking of Constable’s intentions, “The Hay Wain” has by degrees en- alternative means to feed his family now that the commons tered popular imagination with a specific cultural loading, as are closed to him and the new farming technology has made the English georgic ideal representing what John Barrell him dispensable to the squire. The driver of the hay wain, called in The Dark Side of the Landscape (1980) “permanence, too, could plausibly end his day of seasonally contracted la- the stability of English agriculture” (148-9). The empty hay bor at some insurrectionary meeting and, when night falls, cart in the center is returning to the field in the distant right be setting stables on fire. 9 “The Hay Wain” was the last of his of the picture where reapers are at work, and will soon load major Stour Valley paintings; after 1820, one could argue up the cart once more for its return journey. A washerwo- that Constable shifted his focus to Hampstead and Salisbury man and fisherman are uninterested witnesses to an un- prompted by his painful awareness that the East Anglian remarkable event that will not only repeat itself numerous community of his boyhood was fast falling apart. The still mo- times during the course of this midsummer day, but is also, at ment of “The Hay Wain,” according to this reading, stands as another level, a timeless act, a ritual element of the diurnal a monumental defense against the social unrest that would round of English country life, simple evidence of what Con- ultimately produce the Reform Bill, a prospect Constable stable’s favorite poet, Thomson, called “the glories of the cir- regularly reflected on in his letters with fear and loathing. cling year” (“Summer” l.14). The sky too belongs to the complacent image of cyclical continuity, as if to echo Haz- The problem with containing the ever-popular “Hay litt’s trust that “It is the same setting sun that we see and re- Wain” wholly within a Tory autobiography of georgic nostal- member year after year, through summer and winter, seed- gia, however, as John Barrell does, is that so few of its admir- time and harvest... the glittering sunny showers, and De- ers are now personally familiar with such a scene’s having cember snows—are still the same, or accompanied with the ever existed, or understand its references. And yet “The Hay same thoughts and ‘feelings’” ( Complete Works , ed. Howe Wain” still retains its sentimental power. By its rhythmic [1934] 5:102-3). structure, its implication of time passing both in the trajec- tory of the cart and the “weathered” naturalness of its man- But landscape, as Constable himself acknowledged, “is made elements—the worn brick, the half-submerged remains the child of history,” and there are many pitfalls for the in- of the jetty—the picture assures viewers, in Kroeber’s felici- formed viewer seeking such pastoral comforts from “The Hay tous phrase, “that we are at home on the earth,” whoever we Wain” ( Discourses 40). The little ford breasted by the cart is are. 10 By inscrutable means, Constable’s localism becomes by no means timeless: the water and irrigation system of the localism-in-general. The specific class history of the Stour Val- East Anglian countryside had been overhauled in the 1740s ley complicates ones viewing experience of the painting, but by a system of canals on the Stour River, built in response to cannot offset the wonderous self-sufficiency of the image, a particularly dry stretch of summers that decade. The canal which in its utter repletion of natural fact—what Wilcox has system that is a feature of Constable’s six-footers (“Flatford called “The Hay Wain” the “best example of the cross-fer- Mill,” “The Leaping Horse,” etc.) thus represents a moderni- tilisation of ideas, both technical and abstract, surrounding zation undertaken within living memory of Constable’s paint- the cloud studies and the six-footers... the clouds can be ing “The Hay Wain.” The segmentation of the landscape seen as part of a complex nexus of themes and ideas.” 11 The into discrete fields bound by fords, hedgerows and other original title of the painting, “Landscape: Noon” calls atten- markers, which forms the compositional structure of Consta- tion to the light shining directly on the cart, and thence to its ble’s six-footers, is still more recent, a product of the progres- source in “the chief ‘ Organ of Sentiment’ ” above. But the most sive enclosure of common land begun from the 1780s and striking element is the convective cloud formation above the accelerated by the exigencies of war with France. 8 That war, trees. Constable was most drawn to cumulus clouds for their which put great pressure on the price of wheat, also filtered distribution of light across the landscape. He surely prompted many Suffolk farmers to abandon dairy farming. agreed with Howard that “Independently of the beauty and The presence of the reapers in the distant field may thus be a magnificence it adds to the face of nature, the Cumulus sight only possible within a decade of Constable’s painting. serves to screen the earth from the direct rays of the sun; by By 1820, England as a pastoral idyll of swains and shepherd its multiplied reflections to diffuse, and, as it were, econo- had long passed into myth. mise the Light” ( The Climate of London [1833] L:xliv).
After the war in 1815, a new round of enclosures in The economy of light—its diffusions across the varying East Anglia displaced the population, leading to unemploy- textures of water, wood, brick and foliage—is the essence of
Constable’s art. The sky, as the source of that light, produces 6:76) At the same time, there must have been a purely aes- what Kroeber calls “the chiaroscuro of meaning” characteris- thetic thrill in entering so completely into “Cloudland, gor- tic of the mature landscapes ( British Romantic Art [1986] 40). geous land!” as Coleridge called it (“Fancy in Nubibus” That is, Constable’s radical innovation occurs not at the com- [1818] I:9) By the time Constable embarked on his cloud positional level, but at the point of contact between brush studies as a means of mastering the painterly relation of land and canvas. The relationship between paint and perception and sky, however, natural philosophers had begun to recog- is entirely fluid, depending on where one stands in relation nize that that relation was not simply formal and timeless, but to the canvas. The closer one peers at a particular element— dynamic and historically specific, dependent on human activ- light reflected on the water, the outline of a cloud—the ity. French naturalist the Comte de Buffon (read widely in more indistinct, in fact mysterious, the technical achieve- English in the early nineteenth century) argued that agricul- ment becomes. Naturalism is an inadequate word for that tural development ameliorated climate, a happy idea achievement. “The Hay Wain” is an artificial reality-system Thomas Jefferson appropriated for his promotion of Ameri- dependent in equal part on scrupulous attention to “natural” can western expansion. 12 Luke Howard, in turn, recognized effects of which a viewer might be reminded in his own opti- that the spread of cities affected the weather, and that win- cal memory, and the translation of those effects in the studio ters in the suburbs of London—for instance, Hampstead— into a virtuosic language of pigment-signs, organized to pro- had “improved” in his lifetime. Taking this climatological duce the impression of both a conscientious dependence on view of “The Hay Wain,” one finds a landscape that was, in nature and stand-alone totality. the eyes of its contemporaries, producing its own sky, warm- ing the climate and stimulating greater rainfall. The under- Neither naturalism nor pictorial totality guarantees standing of this process, as it then was, was no less grandiose meaning, however. Even the weather itself, albeit so naturalis- for being benign. Johnson chose a recognizable Enlighten- tically delineated, is dubious. Some commentators have fore- ment stooge in the astronomer of Rasselas , who imagines he cast imminent rain, while in Constable and His Influence on can control the seasons. The supposed ameliorative relation Landscape Art (1902) Charles Holmes dismisses the entire pic- between climate, agriculture and human settlement was an ture as “merely an aggregate of circumstances suggesting fine enabling premise of imperialism, where the temperate cli- weather” (174, emphasis added). When critics of the Stour mate of Europe was, with its people and cultures, to be ex- Valley paintings, and even Fisher himself, began to call for ported across the globe. “Climate change,” in this progressive new subject matter, Constable responded that “weather and sense, “was one of the most talked about subjects during the effect” was all the variety he required. ( Correspondence 6:181) early life of the [American] republic.” (Bewell 131). Clouds, in particular, were essential to his capturing “that playful change so much desired by the painter.” ( Discourses In the Enlightenment narrative of European history,
- In other words, even if one agrees that “The Hay Wain” the scientific view of climate naturally succeeded the biblical represents weather, the problem of meaning is only deferred. view, which saw vicissitudes of weather as signs of divine judg- “Change” is a process, not a subject, and the weather, even in ment. But belief systems overlap in messy ways. A providential its verisimilitude, is ambiguous. The direction of the wind, as view of weather remained in popular circulation in Consta- evidenced by the smoke from the cottage chimney drifting ble’s lifetime, for instance, in Gilbert White’s Natural History away toward the trees, suggests that the storm clouds are pass- of Selborne , widely read through the 1820s. Constable himself ing: a gray morning is giving way to a brilliant midday. Con- was reading White in 1821-2, with its numerous allusions to stable preferred to paint at right angles to the wind, and so it theologians of the prior age who viewed climate, and the appears here, with the white clouds to the deep right wind and rain in particular, as God’s communication to the (south), though playing a prominent role in the composi- stewards of His creation. Constables letters on the weather of tion, actually having little to do with the literal “weather” of Selborne focus accordingly on its extremities, on “terrible” the scene. The dark clouds are the climatic past of the image, frosts and “scalding” heat waves, those events that give the not its present or future, which lies overhead beyond the strongest impression of a divine hand. “The summer of the frame. That said, meteorology, literally speaking, is marginal year 1783,” he writes, “was an amazing and portentous one, to one’s experience of the actual painting. The clouds exist, and full of horrible phaenomena” (ed. Kearton [1902] 281). as Kroeber argues , “to endow the still scene with movement” The weather is no guarantor of georgic stability, but a kind of ( Romantic Landscape Vision 19). In the grammar of the image, cosmic goblin given to wild tricks. White’s meteorological the sky is the verb of motion, inflecting the hay cart itself with world view is suffused with pre-Enlightenment catastrophism, implicit movement, dramatizing, within the viewer’s pictorial “a keen sense,” as Stuart Peterfreund wrote, “that theodical imaginations, time past and time future. time is running out, and that meteorological and other signs portend just such an end.” 13 Constable considered the harmonization of the land- scape and sky as the greatest technical challenge he faced. “I In looking at “The Hay Wain,” which climatological have done a good deal of skying” he wrote to his confidant view was closer to Constable’s. His own written sentiments Archdeacon Fisher after his first summer at Hampstead, “I are decidedly conventional: the painter of nature shall be am determined to conquer all difficulties.” ( Correspondence “led to adore the hand that has, with such lavish beneficence,
and meteorologically specific descriptions: “Morning under [1847] unpaginated). As Fuseli reportedly said, “I like de the sun—Clouds silvery grey, on warm ground Sultry. Light landscapes of Constable... but he makes me call for my wind to the S.W. fine all day—but rain in the night follow- greatcoat and umbrella” (C. R. Leslie, Memoirs of the Life of ing.” The last phrase suggests that Constable returned to the John Constable [1911] 87). study the following day to confirm the weather events the im- age itself portends. Rain is the future of Constable’s paintings, but also the past. Constable preferred to paint his landscapes after a night The painterly organization of “The Hay Wain” may se- of rain, which brought out what he proprietarily called his duce one to think of georgic permanence and stability, but “dews” and “ freshness ”: “Nature is never seen, in this climate the cloud studies cannot. Their subject is change itself, or at least, to greater perfection than at about nine o’clock in weather as a figure for change. The subject is thus less the the mornings of July and August... and it is still more de- clouds than the invisible presence of the wind they signify. lightful if vegetation has been refreshed with a shower during The skyscapes are deeply negative images, with the clouds, the night.” ( Correspondence 3: 96; Discourses 17) The controver- themselves intangible, called upon not only to fill the vac- sial “white spots” he applied in finishing his paintings were in uum of the atmosphere but to serve, in their pictorial fixity, fact temporal weather markers, the residue of a recently con- as signs of motion and metaphors of instability. Their empha- cluded meteorological event, essential to the image’s dur´ee. sis is not on a dramatic meteorological event, but the mun- However sensitive to criticism, Constable resisted all calls to dane unfolding of weather itself as a formal pattern of dispense with the effect. But on top of the hottest decade on relations between opacity, light and implicit motion. Between record, and with English summers increasingly dry, dewy 1817-19, Turner was conducting sky studies of his own, but freshness will decline as a characteristic of real-world Consta- his interest lay in the cosmic “apocalypse of heaven,” not in ble country. July, 2006, was the sunniest month in three hun- weather as such. Ruskin devoted pages of panegyric in Mod- dred years of weather records in England and, were ern Painters to the naturalism of Turner’s skies but never con- Constable on the Heath, he would have waited in vain for his sidered their role anything but figurative. For Ruskin, the clouds, his sketchbook filled with moribund Claudean blue. Turnerian sky was “almost human in its passions, almost spiri- tual in its tenderness, almost divine in its infinity, its appeal Our consciousness of climate change has produced an to what is immortal in us is as distinct, as its ministry of chas- image of weather the very opposite of the georgic ideal long tisement or of blessing to what is mortal is essential” (I: 218, attributed to “The Hay Wain.” The seasons now are not pro- 202). Constable’s skies, by contrast, are not spiritualized; they ceeding cyclically, where any perception of “change” might are purified of sentiment. “Nothing numinous rides these be comfortably brought within the parameters of natural va- clouds,” as Wieseltier observes ( Constable’s Skies 58). Instead riation, but according to a linear trajectory of potentially irre- of the figurations of heaven, Constable’s cloud studies re- versible transformation. Constable preferred to paint on days present “reality as historical process;” they are, in fact, studies with a westerly wind, which brought his favorite rain-bearing of process itself. cumulus clouds (Thornes 66). But the clouds that so often promise rain in Constable’s famous landscapes are fewer in From our meteorological moment of the twenty-first number and precipitate less. “Constable Country” and the cli- century, the processes of weather, as Constable observed mate that produced it is vanishing, an artifact of climate his- them, now represent a specific climate history: the condition tory. With this knowledge, too, the half-century long debate of the northern sky on the very brink of modern, man-made between the meteorological and modernist readings of Con- climate change. With that, all is changed utterly. The conven- stable’s cloud studies is effectively redundant. tional art-historical reading of the cloud studies as experi- ments in abstraction necessarily gives way to the recognition In the age of global warming, Constable’s cloud studies of their empirical, literal, documentary power. Some clima- produce two new figures, heretofore unreadable. Constable’s tologists predict that over the course of the present century, image of a September morning sky on Hampstead Heath in if Co2 emissions remain at their current levels, there will be a 1821 has crossed from the literal into the figurative, from the small increase in annual rainfall in Britain, but as much as meteorological into the apocalyptic. Mundane in concep- 30% less rain in the summer in southern England. 15 Consta- tion, it now nevertheless bears the deep pathos of a specific ble inherited Thomson’s vision of an temperate England of historical process it invisibly captures, namely the climate “timely rains,” where the dance of the seasons could be relied change that with the impact of industrialization and urban- upon to “soften[ ] into joy the surly storms.” (“Summer” ization was just beginning. Next to it, the idealized skies of l.124, 126) In the coming century in Britain, more rain will European art—Tiepolo’s vault of heaven, Rosa’s terrors of come in the form of violent storms, and in the non-summer the storm—appear cold or quaintly melodramatic. Turner’s months. Untimely rains and surly storms are forecast. Consta- skies are apocalyptic, but reveal nothing of the real end-of- ble’s art depended on wet summers (1821 was one “in the humankind. It is the literal, meteorological sky, Constable’s wet extreme,” according to Howard) that would preserve the sky, that contains within it imaginable portents of last things. greenness and luxuriance of the foliage through the heat of The Romantic sublime in art, it turns out, falsely figured the July and August and into the autumn ( Barometrographia apocalypse, which will come not with the wrath and power of
a storm on the Alps but ever-so-gradually, as the impalpable minions will be adapted, and at which Tory hearts will for- onset of clouds appearing above a stand of trees in a Consta- ever gladden. The skyscapes, however, as studies of weather- ble oil sketch. as-such, have come to read as unnerving commentaries on that georgic stability and England as a climatic ideal. Set The second figure that now adheres to the cloud stud- alongside the cloud studies, “the signs and symbols of perma- ies, when it didn’t before, is loss. Together with the experi- nence” in “The Hay Wain,” are “transformed into markers of ence, unique in Western painting, of imaginatively doubt.” 19 The forecast in and of “The Hay Wain” is uncer- forecasting the weather—an adventure in futurity—the tain. Certainly, nothing about it or the cloud studies now sug- cloud studies now speak also to a lost climatological past. gests our “transcendent survival” of climate, as Ann From our own historical moment, they represent the irrecov- Bermingham could once safely argue. (159) erable September-ness of 1821. Constable’s September is not ours. Old-fashioned melancholy derived its pleasures from a Climate change, as a phenomenon, is a problematic comparison between the slow ebb of human existence in lin- object of perception, as impalpable as a painting or Roman- ear time against the cyclical renewal of the seasons. But with tic poem. 20 One’s experience of long-term changes in the the buds, butterflies and birds beloved of Gilbert White arriv- weather takes place between the statistic and the anecdote, ing up to two weeks earlier in England than just a generation and climate memory, as Howard saw already in 1818, is un- ago, March will soon be the cruelest month for such reflec- trustworthy: “Our recollection of the weather, even at the dis- tions, and we will be able to mourn along with our own youth tance of a few years, being very imperfect, we are apt to and possibilities the ever-diminishing possibilities for human suppose that the Seasons are not what they formerly were; civilization on a warming planet. while, in fact, they are only going through a series of changes, such as we may have heretofore already witnessed, In an ironic twist to the unfolding geo-tragedy of cli- and forgotten.” (1:xxxiv) The strong impulse when asked the mate change, the terms for our experience of clouds and cli- question—has the climate changed?—is to say “yes,” when mate in Constable now threaten to turn full circle, back to one may have experienced only variation or nothing at all. Gilbert White and the providential theory of nature to which Do Constable’s clouds change after 1821? One likewise he subscribed: “it pleaseth God, for the punishment of a na- wants to say yes, but are vulnerable to contradiction. In the tion, to withhold rain by a special interposition... this distri- running, ruinous debate over climate change, even the statis- bution of the clouds and rain is to me (I say) a great tical truth of warming, it is argued, may represent mostly vari- argument of providence and divine disposition.” 16 The dis- ation and little or no unique change outside the natural tinctly religious figure of the apocalypse has resumed its rele- climate cycle—at least, such is the never-fully-falsifiable skep- vance to British Romantic art, not in the vortical tical position. The space of climate change denial is as wide phantasmagoria of Turner, but the incremental material open as the debate over Constable’s skies. processes of global warming unwittingly memorialized by John Constable. The catastrophist viewpoint might be de-the- Constable took Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses seri- ologized, but the scenarios we are now taught to envision are ously, and was always looking to leaven his fascination for lo- no less apocalyptic. With sea levels predicted to rise by up to cal detail—the “slimy posts & woodwork” etc.—with a more a meter this century, and a radically more violent and uneven elevated “general idea” amenable to academic orthodoxy distribution of rainfall, we can expect “food shortages, de- ( Correspondence 6:77) Out of view of the Academy, he took creased water supplies in key regions, and disruption to en- great painterly interest in the weather, the very definition of ergy supplies... global conflict and economic malaise.” 17 the local and transient Reynolds abhorred. The cloud stud- Human misery aside, as many as a third of all species of ies, meteorologically conceived, were anti-academic in their plants and animals may be on the path to extinction by 2050. essence and only began to find an audience in the early twen- In the words of one NASA climatologist: “I wouldn’t be tieth century with the final overthrow of academic art. That shocked to find out that by 2100 most things were de- audience is still growing, but its view of the paintings has stroyed.”^18 Presumably that includes landscape painting, changed. We are all Constables now—obsessive, even morbid and essays on it in The Wordsworth Circle. students of the weather. That “most magnificent ordinance of the clouds,” as Ruskin called it in Modern Painters (1856), Constable’s full intentions in painting the cloud stud- no longer points to infinity or the Divine but to a set of ies remain indecipherable, but the reading newly available to wholly material historical probabilities, to climate-as-the-end- us positions them as working critiques of the georgic enlight- of-history (IV: 12). enment skies of the six-footers. None of the cloud studies subsequently appear in any of Constable’s academic paint- Constable was advised by his academic mentors to em- ings because they are self-critical studies, standing in reflec- ploy his skies as a “White Sheet drawn behind the Objects,” a tion upon, not as preparations for, Constable’s commercial backdrop to the main business of his paintings (6:76-7). His art. That is, “The Hay Wain” might easily be appropriated by rejection of that advice led to an extraordinary series of oil an enlightenment georgic ideal, as the image of a temperate, sketches that have the impalpability of climate as their very quintessentially European climate to which the colonial do- subject. In the cloud studies of 1821-2, Constable is indeed “a
