Skyscapes

Pictures in which the sky dominates: clouds, weather, sunsets and open air, from Dutch landscapes to cloud photographs.

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About

Skies take up most of the picture in many Dutch landscapes of the 17th century. Jacob van Ruisdael's views of Haarlem, painted around 1670, set a low, flat town beneath towering banks of cloud and shifting light. In 1821–22 John Constable painted dozens of oil sketches of clouds on Hampstead Heath, often noting the date, time and wind, two decades after Luke Howard had given cloud types their modern names. Eugène Boudin's beach scenes on the Normandy coast gave so much room to changing weather that Camille Corot reportedly called him king of the skies.

Photography let artists isolate the sky completely. Alfred Stieglitz's Equivalents (1925–34) show only clouds, as images of feeling. Georgia O'Keeffe's Sky Above Clouds IV (1965) looks down from an aircraft on a field of white shapes, and James Turrell's skyspaces frame open sky through an opening in the ceiling so that it seems solid.