This oil study reflects the early nineteenth-century fascination with the sky as an autonomous subject of artistic and scientific enquiry. Across Europe, painters such as John Constable, Johan Christian Dahl, and Carl Blechen painted sequences of pure sky and cloud studies, while parallel developments in science and literature, including Luke Howard’s pioneering cloud classification, Goethe’s poetic meditations, [1] and John Ruskin’s later meteorological observations, deepened the cultural resonance of this developing artistic practice.

In France, the tradition was shaped by Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, whose influential Élémens de perspective pratique, published in 1799, urged students to make plein-air études to capture the changing sky under specific lighting conditions. He recommended limiting each exercise to thirty minutes, both to account for the fleeting nature of atmospheric effects and to promote a swift and free handling of paint. By the early decades of the nineteenth century, the depiction of shifting atmospheric phenomena had become a means for exploring new forms of expression. As Basil Taylor observed of Constable’s cloud studies, such works were animated as much by 'instinctive sentiments' as by intellectual curiosity. [2]