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The artist John Constable, clouds, and Hampstead

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THE TATE BRITAIN art gallery in London is holding a special exhibition of the works of John Constable (1776-1837) and John Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) until 12 April 2026. Amongst the many magnificent paintings on display, there are several small paintings of clouds by Constable. I was particularly interested to see the cloud studies because I had written about them in my book “Beneath a Wide Sky: Hampstead and its Environs”. Here is an extract from my book. It deals with Constable and his interest in clouds:

“One of Hampstead’s attractions for Constable was its wide expanse of sky, which, as Barratt wrote, the artist:

‘… regarded as the keynote of landscape art, and so assiduously did he study cloud, sky, and atmosphere in the Hampstead days that Leslie, his biographer, was able to become possessed of twenty of these special studies, each dated and described. Constable was a man of Wordsworthian simplicity of character, fond of all things rural, and devotedly attached to birds and animals.’

The website of Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum reinforces what Barratt wrote:

‘While living at Hampstead, Constable made a series of oil sketches of the sky alone, each one marked with the date, time and a short description of the conditions. His interest in clouds was influenced partly by the work of the scientist Luke Howard, who had in 1803 written a pioneering study, classifying different types of cloud ...’

In ‘The Invention of Clouds’ by Richard Hamblyn, a biography of the chemist and amateur meteorologist, who devised the modern classification of clouds (cumulus, nimbus, etc.), Luke Howard (1772-1864), it is noted that Constable, who was familiar with Howard’s work, focussed his concentration:

‘… on the extension of his observational range and clouds were the means that he had chosen for the task. After years of searching for an isolated image, seeking a motif upon which to weigh his technical advancement as a painter, he had found it at last in the unending sequences of clouds that emerged and dissolved before his eyes like images on a photographic plate.’

During the summers of 1821 and 1822, Constable made over one hundred cloud studies on the higher ground of Hampstead and its heath.  Writing in 1964 in his ‘The Philosophy of Modern Art’, the art critic Herbert Read (1893-1968), who lived in Hampstead, commented that Constable was:

‘… rather a modest craftsman, interested in the efficiency of his tools, the chemistry of his materials, the technique of his craft. His preparatory ‘sketches’ are no more romantic than a weather report. But they are accurate, they are vividly expressed, they are truthful.’

And here the extract from my book ends. It is because of Constable’s ‘connections’ with Hampstead and the clouds above it that I chose the title “Beneath a Wide Sky …” I had seen a few of Constable’s cloud studies before, but never so many together as I viewed at the Tate Britain exhibition. My book is available both as a paperback and a Kindle from Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B09R2WRK92

A painting of Hampstead at Sotheby’s auction house

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THE ARTIST JOHN Constable (1776-1837) lived at various addresses in London’s Hampstead. There, he created many sketches and paintings. He was extremely interested in depicting clouds – difficult subjects for an artist to portray convincingly, but Constable was able to do it well. Hampstead, high above most of the rest of London, provided a good spot for an artist interested in creating pictures of meteorological phenomena. High above the built-up parts of the city with no obstructions in his field of vision, Constable was able to set up his easel under a vast sky.

Recently (5th of June 2023), we visited the pre-auction viewing rooms at Sotheby’s in New Bond Street. In one of the galleries, paintings by ‘Old Masters’ were on display. One of them, which caught my eye, was by Constable, and labelled “Study for Hampstead Heath with a rainbow”. Valued at between £300,000 and £400,000, this picture includes a pond in the foreground; two people on the edge of the pond; some trees; a windmill with some small buildings near it; and a flock of birds flying above a small hill. This rustic scene is lovely, but what really catches the viewer’s attention is the sky. Constable has painted billowing clouds, which almost completely hide the clear sky behind them. Some of the clouds are white and others are ominously grey. Almost as accurate as a photograph, this cloudscape does more than slavishly reproduce what the artist saw – it manages to evoke what he must have felt seeing these clouds. And given the fleeting, ever-changing appearances of clouds, the artist must have worked swiftly to capture the celestial scene he saw.

Although I know that Hampstead once had a windmill near Whitestone Pond (now remembered by a lane called Windmill Hill), judging by its surroundings, the pond in the picture was not Whitestone. It might have been one that local enthusiasts he reconstructed recently – located beside Branch Hill. There is a painting in the Tate Gallery’s collections called “Branch Hill Pond, Hampstead Heath, with a Boy Sitting on a Bank”, which has a similar appearance to that which I saw in Sotheby’s, except that there is no windmill. Constable made many paintings and sketches that included the Branch Hill Pond, but apart from the picture I saw in Sotheby’s, which is a study rather than a finished work, they do not include a windmill.

A few months ago, I published a book about Hampstead and some of its interesting neighbours (including Highgate, West Hampstead, and Primrose Hill). Some people have wondered about the title I chose. It was because of Constable’s fascination with sky and clouds and his years of residence in Hampstead that I chose to give my book about the area the title “Beneath a Wide Sky: Hampstead and its Environs”.

My book is available from Amazon as a paperback or an e-book:https://www.amazon.co.uk/BENEATH-WIDE-SKY-HAMPSTEAD-ENVIRONS/dp/B09R2WRK92/