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Weather in Art: From Symbol to Science

Wednesday, February 26, 2020
2:00 p.m.
West Building Lecture Hall

This horizontal painting is filled with gray and white clouds against a blue sky. Wisps of white clouds are interspersed among banks of darker gray clouds against a pale blue sky in the top half of the painting. A tower of gray clouds to the left obscure a deep red circle, which only becomes evident upon careful inspection. Rays of pale shell pink streak down from the clouds along the bottom edge of the painting to suggest sunlight at sunset.

John Constable, Cloud Study: Stormy Sunset, 1821-1822, oil on paper on canvas, Gift of Louise Mellon in honor of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 1998.20.1

In conjunction with the True to Nature: Open-Air Painting in Europe, 1780–1870 exhibition, David Gariff presents a slide lecture that discusses shifting definitions and visual explorations of weather in European painting.

David Gariff, lecturer