Constable's Sky Sketches

Hawes, Louis

doi:10.2307/750618

Cited by 13 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…It seems reasonable to posit that Constable relied on certain artistic conventions or formal patterns as armatures for his paintings of these ever-shifting motifs as painters often did. It has also been argued that this phase of study was a belated response to Luke Howard's classification of clouds into cumulus, cirrus, stratus, etc., a typology disseminated widely via the publication in 1803 of his Essay on the Modifications of Clouds [6], though there is no evidence that Constable owned or consulted Howard's publication [7], [8], [9]. Other scholars have tended to shy away from attributing Constable's remarkable realism to any single breakthrough, either conceptual or technical, preferring instead to attribute the artist's achievement to a constellation of factors [9], [10], [11].…”

Section: The Art Historical Questionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It has also been argued that this phase of study was a belated response to Luke Howard's classification of clouds into cumulus, cirrus, stratus, etc., a typology disseminated widely via the publication in 1803 of his Essay on the Modifications of Clouds [6], though there is no evidence that Constable owned or consulted Howard's publication [7], [8], [9]. Other scholars have tended to shy away from attributing Constable's remarkable realism to any single breakthrough, either conceptual or technical, preferring instead to attribute the artist's achievement to a constellation of factors [9], [10], [11]. Whether guided by empirical study or artistic conven-tion, some room for the exercise of the artist's own imagination is readily acknowledged [11].…”

Section: The Art Historical Questionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Howard's taxonomy was published in 1803 and was widely disseminated during Constable's lifetime, so it was available to him. But there is no evidence that Constable possessed it, and the artist's extant correspondence and other documents make no direct reference to Howard [9]. More recent scholars tend to cite instead Constable's dedication to sustained periods of empirical observation of clouds [10], [11] and his familiarity with earlier paintings of naturalistic landscapes by artists like Claude Lorrain or Willem van de Velde the Younger, both of whom were well represented in English collections during Constable's lifetime [9], [24].…”

Section: Constable's Cloudsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…But there is no evidence that Constable possessed it, and the artist's extant correspondence and other documents make no direct reference to Howard [9]. More recent scholars tend to cite instead Constable's dedication to sustained periods of empirical observation of clouds [10], [11] and his familiarity with earlier paintings of naturalistic landscapes by artists like Claude Lorrain or Willem van de Velde the Younger, both of whom were well represented in English collections during Constable's lifetime [9], [24]. In addition, a Romantic explanation for Constable's naturalism likewise persists in the scholarly literature to this day, attributing his naturalism at least in part to an emotional or spiritual impulse toward accuracy in his depictions of natural phenomena [25].…”

Section: Constable's Cloudsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Machine Learning Paradigm for Studying Pictorial Realism: Are Constable's Clouds More Real than His Contemporaries?

Zhang¹,

Mansfield²,

Li³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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European artists have sought to create life-like images since the Renaissance. The techniques used by artists to impart realism to their paintings often rely on approaches based in mathematics, like linear perspective; yet the means used to assess the verisimilitude of realist paintings have remained subjective, even intuitive. An exploration of alternative and relatively objective methods for evaluating pictorial realism could enhance existing art historical research. We propose a machine-learning-based paradigm for studying pictorial realism in an explainable way. Unlike subjective evaluations made by art historians or computer-based painting analysis exploiting inexplicable learned features, our framework assesses realism by measuring the similarity between clouds painted by exceptionally skillful 19th-century landscape painters like John Constable and photographs of clouds. The experimental results of cloud classification show that Constable approximates more consistently than his contemporaries the formal features of actual clouds in his paintings. Our analyses suggest that artists working in the decades leading up to the invention of photography worked in a mode that anticipated some of the stylistic features of photography. The study is a springboard for deeper analyses of pictorial realism using computer vision and machine learning.

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Section: The Art Historical Questionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Art Historical Questionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Constable's Cloudsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Constable's Cloudsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

A Machine Learning Paradigm for Studying Pictorial Realism: Are Constable's Clouds More Real than His Contemporaries?

Zhang¹,

Mansfield²,

Li³

et al. 2022

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…‘I HAVE done a good deal of skying’, wrote John Constable to his friend John Fisher in 1821, referring to his recent efforts at drawing clouds, the most ‘arduous’ challenge for an artist but also the most important task to master since ‘[t]he sky is the source of light in nature – and governs everything’ (quoted in Hawes, 1969: 344, emphasis in original). Any optical engagement with the world involves dealing with the governor, the medium through which all form is apprehended.…”

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confidence: 99%

Signs of the Sky, Signs of the Times

Beck¹

2011

Theory, Culture & Society

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From Alfred Stieglitz to Trevor Paglen, photographs of the sky have engaged with the relationship between abstraction and representation. This article argues that Stieglitz’s attempt to convert the ‘natural’ abstraction of the sky into the ‘cultural’ abstraction of the modernist image opens a space through which recent photographers have moved to use the sky photograph as a means of interrogating issues of openness and concealment that are at once aesthetic and political. The invisibility of signs of military-industrial power embedded within airspace is, in Richard Misrach’s and Paglen’s photographs, registered but not exactly shown, since the capacity of the photograph to reveal the unseen is challenged by the effectiveness of contemporary modes of concealment. What is shown in these images, however, is the condition of hiddenness itself, which is encountered by Misrach and Paglen not only through the abstraction of the sky photographs but by situating those images within a discursive field – through the use of titles, captions and an explication of working methods – that regrounds the atmospheric as a spectacular function of power’s open secret.

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The Weather Dating of John Constable's Cloud Studies

Thornes

1979

Weather

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The photograph on the preceding page, taken at infra-red wavelengths by the Very High Resolution Radiometer of the NOAA 5 Satellite at 1940 GMT on 16 September 1978, shows an intense swirl of cloud associated with a depression of 954 mb, situated near 64"N, 40"W on the corresponding 1800 GMT chart. The depression developed very rapidly as the circulation of an old hurricane (Flossie) moved north-east into the warm sector of a shallow wave on a vigorous baroclinic zone. The developing low rapidly occluded, with the warm air of the hurricane being lifted into the extensive area of frontal cloud ahead of the system. The behaviour of the low, despite the rapid distortion of the thermal steering pattern by the intense circulation, was anomalous in that its track curved anticyclonically (to the right), symptomatic of the warm-core origin of the system.Very strong winds were a feature of the low with steady winds up to 70 knots affecting ships and exposed islands to the north of Scotland. The maximum reported gusts from anemograph stations were 87 knots at Kirkwall Airport in the Orkney Islands and 84 knots at Lerwick in the Shetlands.The main feature of the pattern over the UK, shown mostly cloud-covered at the bottom of the picture, is the cloud associated with the trailing cold front. To the south of the front a very strong temperature inversion in the warm sector was associated with a layer of stratocumulus which is breaking up into lee-wave billows downstream of the higher ground of Wales.Land features of interest are the darker (warmer) patches associated with the conurbations of London and Paris and the Seine valley. Notice also the dark streak of the Rhine valley at lower right.

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Constable's Sky Sketches

Cited by 13 publications

References 0 publications

A Machine Learning Paradigm for Studying Pictorial Realism: Are Constable's Clouds More Real than His Contemporaries?

A Machine Learning Paradigm for Studying Pictorial Realism: Are Constable's Clouds More Real than His Contemporaries?

Signs of the Sky, Signs of the Times

The Weather Dating of John Constable's Cloud Studies

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