The grid: Constable’s rolling clouds

Though JMW Turner is perhaps the most renowned British painter when it comes to blazing horizons, his contemporary John Constable’s paintings of the sky can be equally stirring. Displayed at Tate Britain’s new exhibition, Turner & Constable: Rivals & Originals, Constable’s oil sketches of burgeoning, rolling clouds capture their fast-changing lightness, darkness, movement and feeling in real time.

Between 1820 and 1823, Constable produced dozens of these images, imbuing his landscapes with tension and animation. As he wrote in a letter to his friend John Fisher: “It will be difficult to name a class of landscape in which the sky is not the key note, the standard of scale and the chief organ of sentiment.”