Cloud Spotting with John Constable and Alfred Stieglitz

Ed Voves | Art Eyewitness | 25th September 2026

In 1821 Constable did something unusual – he made studies of the sunset, with the land below treated as a secondary feature. He made many such “skying” works and thought the sky in a landscape painting was “the standard of scale and the chief organ of sentiment”.  Photography promised an ability to capture the sky with even greater immediacy, but the technology took a long time to meet that challenge. Only with Stieglitz’s cloud studies in the 1920’s did photography start to capture “the ethereal realm above our heads”.