Sky Study with Rainbow 1827

John Constable made this sky study with watercolor on paper in the 19th century. It captures a fleeting moment in nature, a rainbow piercing through a dark, cloudy sky. Constable, working in England, was part of a broader cultural shift toward valuing direct observation and experience. This was a period of scientific advancement, and a growing interest in the natural world was taking hold across Europe. This study, like many others he produced, shows an almost scientific approach to the observation of weather. The rainbow, a symbol often associated with divine promise, becomes in Constable’s hands an object of natural, almost empirical investigation. What does it mean to locate the divine in the everyday, or to see it at all? To understand Constable's project more fully, we might consider the contemporary developments in meteorology, or indeed the Romantic movement's fascination with the sublime power of nature. The social conditions that enabled and shaped Constable's art – the art market, the Royal Academy, the changing status of landscape painting – are all essential to understanding his artistic project.