1. John Constable, from lectures at the Royal Institution (June 1836) “...I am anxious that the world should be inclined to look to painters for information on painting. I hope to show that ours is a regularly taught profession; that it is scientific as well as poetic; that imagination alone never did, and never can, produce works that are to stand by a comparison with realities; and to show, by tracing the connecting links in the history of landscape painting, that no great painter was ever self-taught.” “…Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not landscape be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but experiments?”

2. Constable’s Study of Clouds at Hampstead, London

3. Study of Clouds, Ashmolean Museum

4. Clouds, 5 September 1822, National Gallery of Victoria

5. Road to ‘the Spaniards’, Hampstead, Philadelphia

6. Cloud study, horizon of trees 27 September 1821, Royal Academy of Arts, London

7. View from Hampstead Heath, looking towards Harrow, Manchester

8. Landscape with Clouds, New Art Gallery Walsall

9. Constable’s White Horse, New York

10. Constable’s Brighton Beach, Victoria & Albert Museum, London

11. Constable’s The Haywain, National Gallery, London

12. Bibliography Richard Hamblyn, The Invention of Clouds: How an Amateur Meteorologist Forged the Language of the Skies, the true story of Luke Howard. In 1803, Howard gave the clouds their names- cumulus, stratus, cirrostratus, cirrocumulus, and cirrus. Copyright 2001.