Constable and "skying".

In October 1821 John Constable wrote to his dearest friend John Fisher that he had been engaged in a "good deal of skying," by which he meant making oil sketches of clouds under various weather conditions. In the exhibition catalogue Constable (Tate Gallery, London, 1991) the coauthors Leslie Paris and Ian Fleming-Williams estimate that in 1821 and 1822 he executed about one hundred such studies, many of them bearing on the reverse precise observations about the weather conditions he was attempting to paint, even the time of day and information about the prevailing wind. In many cases there is enough detail in his notations to match them to actual weather reports for the years in question. Constable was making serious attempts to improve the way he painted skies in his finished oil paintings, for he was acutely aware of the importance of getting the skies right. As he wrote to Fisher in another letter, "I have often been advised to consider my Sky--as a 'White Sheet drawn behind the Objects.' Certainly if the Sky is obtrusive--(as mine are) it is bad, but if they are evaded (as mine are not) it is worse, they must and always shall with me make an effectual part of the composition. It will be difficult to name a class of Landscape, in which the sky is not the 'key note,' 'the standard of 'Scale,' and the chief 'Organ of sentiment'.... The sky is the 'source of light' in nature--and governs every thing.... Their difficulty in painting both as to composition and execution is very great, because with all their brilliancy and consequence, they ought not to come forward or be hardly thought about in a picture."

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An exhibition devoted to this subject, entitled Constable's Skies, is on view at Salander-O'Reilly Galleries in New York City through June 25. The show includes more than twenty-five sky studies on loan from private and museum collections in the United States, Great Britain, and Australia.

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