Cloud Study, 1821, John Constable
With John Constable, we often have to be a little wary of the set-piece ventures, those moments when he is evidently painting to impress. Some of his so called “six-footers” of the 1820s are such works. He seems to be measuring out his experiences by the ladleful, balancing this hedge against that gate, this band of soaring sky against that steeple. All feels too exquisitely composed and even controlled.
By contrast, he is often at his best, and most seemingly and passionately committed to the work in hand, when he is doing something almost for its own sake, and the subject itself feels to be scarcely much of a subject at all – that is how we often think about his cloud studies over Hampstead Heath, for example, that they are tiny notations, as much movements towards as finished works. And yet these studies are often so exquisite precisely because they look snatched, impromptu, unpremeditated, uncalculated to please the potential purchaser. The fact is that Constable seems to be forgetting himself even as he is painting them, so thoroughly absorbed is he into the spectacle.
This small, oil-on-paper cloud study of 1821, painted in the same year as The Hay Wain, is such a painting. It has a brilliant, carefully careless zestfulness about it. It is intemperate, almost rushing. It swings and blows and blusters in all directions at once. Constable’s thrilled eye seems to suggest that the world has been reborn in a mood of rapture. The clouds are in state of constant movement, both receding from us and surging forward towards us, ever playfully refashioning themselves as they scud along. If we looked at an image of this painting, we would have no idea of its size. It could be enormous. Its subject matter – the heavens yawning wide – makes it feel enormous. In fact, it is less than one-foot square; its overreaching subject matter is contained, confined, within the narrowest of compasses. The painting is both light and insubstantial with its play of ever fleeting colours, and also robustly present – see how the greys and the yellows and the pinks seem to thicken it out, giving it body and substance, a kind of forcefulness and feistiness. Like a child staring up, we almost will these clouds, these sometimes lumpish and occasionally breathtakingly graceful maelstroms, to become recognisable shapes. There is a being up there somewhere, we idly speculate, among, behind, within all that reeling limitlessness, even if he is a creature of our fancy.
If the clouds are carelessly self-renewing, self-refashioning, this tiny handful of birds ranging around the skyways is quite the opposite. They are painted with a great attention to character and very particular movement. One appears to hang, idling, in the air, wind-buoyed; another makes a sudden diving, turning curve; yet another seems to float, almost effortlessly. The presence of these birds helps to give the painting some sense of a foreground and a background. We seem to be dealing – it is all a pretty illusion, of course – with near calculable depths of space. The narrow strip of landscape at the painting’s foot also roots it in a particular, though fairly indeterminate (not so to Constable himself, of course) location. This is fairly unusual for the cloud studies of these years, which often consist of nothing but wheeling, vertigo-inducing voids of sky that seem to exist everywhere and nowhere all at once.
Constable himself described this painting, on its verso, so humbly, so matter-of-factly: “Sep.r 28. 1821/Noon – looking. North. West./ Windy from the S.W./large bright clouds flying rather fast/very stormy night followed”.
