Clouds at the Royal Academy

Abstract

THE smoke and haze which commonly obscure the sky in large cities, and the otherwise restricted outlook, allow the town dweller inadequate opportunities for the study of clouds, but to those who live in the country, and to the observant worker in a town when spending a holiday away from his native place, the ever-varying cloud effects form quite as attractive an object of interest as the countryside itself. This being so, it might be thought that in landscape scenes artists would devote at least as much attention to the sky and the clouds above as to the hills and valleys below. That this is not the case will be painfully evident to the meteorologist, or even to the ordinary intelligent observer of Nature who visits the Royal Academy and makes but a cursory examination of its walls. Let it be granted at once that there are notable exceptions, but the conclusion cannot be resisted that to many artists the clouds form a very subsidiary part of the picture, and are put in to produce what to the artist's eye is presumably a pleasing effect, but without the least regard to natural truth.