High, hot & hazy

These wispy cirrostratus mixed with cirrus clouds covered the sky just after 8 am on Friday, August 19th. The dull sky had tints of lavender, cyan and cool grays mixed in the whiteness.


John Constable may have written "cirrus" on the back on one of his paintings. Not all art historians agree on this interpretation of his handwriting. We know from his letters that he was very much interested identifying cloud types and categorizing weather phenomena. 


Constable looked on landscape painting as a natural science, an activity to be studied methodically. In his last public lecture in 1836, he said:

Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not landscape painting be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments?

What a different age it was nearly two hundred years ago. Paintings as experiments--well they certainly are that, but not scientific ones.