Christy Edwall on John Constable’s beclouded contemplations of the Sussex landscape.

Clouds are everywhere after you look at Constable. High shouldered rain clouds above the coast, with that glimmer of electric cream in the nape. Or the thick doughy heaps over the cows that graze in the fields on either side of the Ditchling Road.

‘There is nothing more interesting than the flying shadows across the downs’, the artist wrote in June 1824 to his wife, Maria. He had moved her and their four children to Brighton the previous month in the hope that she would recover from the tuberculosis that would eventually prove fatal. ‘Flying shadows’ is a good phrase for clouds, both because they are insubstantial, nothing to hold onto, but also because – to an artist – they make a collection of constantly changing tonalities and shades. Constable called his field studies of clouds ‘skying’: a subject with a time limit. The cloud, in its temporary state, seems permanent, full-bodied, definite, even as it is always reinventing its own outline. Clouds make it up as they go along.

In the most substantial work Constable produced of Brighton, Chain Pier, Brighton (1826-7), the skies are heavy with clouds. This is not the flat grey of the day that promises drizzle, but cumulonimbus clouds, knitting together, thickening with imminent rain. Beneath them, the beach is littered with human life: a boy plays in the shallows; women, wrapped in colourful shawls under parasols, look out at the view. The folds of their skirts, like the leaning sailboat further out, give away the presence of an insistent wind. A gentleman in light trousers and hat, hand on cocked hip, stares out at the horizon. These are amateur sea-lovers. The professionals sit on the beach: a man in a red cap mends his nets, his catch spilling out of an overturned basket.

The clouds are as heavy with symbolism as they are with rain: these are the unsettled skies of social transition, as Brighton’s meteoric growth – its population almost tripling to 30,000 in 1824 – threatened to displace its local industries with fashionable visitors. The fishermen who had historically mended their nets on the Steine were restricted from accessing it.

The clouds intensify above the end of the Chain Pier, where packets from Dieppe left mail and the occasional passenger. Beneath it, the water is quick and lively, Constable’s white highlights – his ‘snows’ – catching the choppy peaks of the incoming tide. The building of the pier, later to be replaced by the Palace Pier, had been financed, in part, through the philanthropy of George Wyndham, the second Earl of Egremont, owner of Petworth House and patron of JMW Turner. In depicting the Chain Pier, Ian Warrell argues, Constable was trying to get Egremont’s attention. It didn’t work. Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1827, the painting failed to sell until 1838, a year after Constable’s death.

‘Flying shadows’ could just as well describe human life. The Constables returned to Brighton sporadically until 1828, when Maria died. The artist’s visits were busy, with commissions to finish, paintings to send off to his dealer or exhibit. These large paintings – The Leaping Horse, The Cornfield – leave me cold. Their earnestness, careful composition, and slick finish strike me as too self consciously wholesome. Or perhaps admiring them requires a kind of Englishness that you have to be born into.

His pencil, pen and ink sketches, on the other hand, are looser, livelier. There is more life in the bodies that throng the bathing huts (Brighton Beach Looking East, September 1824), or bend to wash something in the lapping waves (Beached Fishing Boats, Mending Nets, Brighton, Looking West, 1824). Boats provided a formal interest, all their angles and lines, as much as being charged with the pathos of industry in transition. Here is the marriage of the human and natural worlds: the overlapping of pleasure and labour, aesthetics and economic survival. A boat, too, is a site of mastery – of quick-handed, decisive work, careful mending, and what Mierle Laderman Ukeles called ‘maintenance art’. Constable’s Studies of Tackle on Brighton Beach (1824), show his interest in the thing-ness of working on and with the sea. It is a kind of still life, unlovely, but respectful in the extending of attention to the tools of other men’s labour, as well as offering a way out of the fashionable strut of a city the artist called ‘Piccadilly by the sea-side’.

But, just as the ‘naturalness’ of Constable’s rural landscapes contains more than a little art, neither were the boat sketches simple spontaneous acts dashed off en plein air. Warrell notes that most of Constable’s boat sketches were reworked towards the end of 1824, the pencil worked up into pen and ink, and given a colour wash for warmth, with the apparent intent of having twelve drawings engraved and sold together. There was a market for boats on beaches. Turner’s sketchbooks, too, were filled with Brighton boats on the shingle beach, both artists inspired, perhaps, by monochromatic pen-and-ink sketches by Claude Lorrain which had been acquired by the British Museum. And both artists were on the coast in the summer of 1824 – their encounters and overlappings can be seen at Tate Britain’s current generous exhibition – Turner in June, and Constable in May, and then again in July until October when the weather turned.

Constable’s summer oil sketches are filled with such examples of unsettled weather. In Brighton Beach, completed 12 June 1824, louring inky skies press down on a horizon that does not yet have turbines. In 1811, his uncle told him ‘cheerfulness is wanted in your landscapes. They are tinctured with a sombre darkness.’ But who wants cheerfulness when there is such darkness on offer? The oppressive energy of his clouds broods over the submissive flatness of the sea and the strand. As a sense of scale, two women shouldering the weather, and a boat passing in the opposite direction suggest there is no time for lingering. And yet, compared with Rainstorm over the Sea, Brighton Beach is positively temperate. In the later oil sketch, Constable’s brushstrokes rake downward in streaks of black, grey, and white. The effect is instinctive, raw, an obliteration of previous efforts: the rounder, rosier stage-set sky beneath.

These images – like Coast Scene with Boat and Stormy Sky, with its creamy lashings of surf, its daubs of colour – feel frustrated, immediate, modern. Their elemental energy is unglossed and primitive, a way of seeing which is against the grain of its artist’s time, preferring intimacy to finish, immediacy to poise.

David Sylvester wrote of Constable in the London Review of Books that, ‘Whatever weather happened to have been found there was irrelevant when it came to composing a picture. Feeling was what determined that weather.’ In these unsettled scenes, one wonders what it was like for Constable to make art from under the shadow of his wife’s illness. To live with a diagnosis is to live with heightened uncertainty. The idea of a cure tantalises – offering a mirage of resolution, of life continuing as it once promised it would, of sufferings being firmly, conclusively, in the past.

Not all Constable’s oil sketches are bleakly, blackly, modernist as Brighton Beach with Shipping and Gig (June 1824), its smudge of a horse and cart suggesting intensity and motion. He responded to the full variability of British weather. In Brighton Beach (July 1824), the palette is straight out of the Impressionists. Cotton-candy skies with wisps of cirrus clouds stretch over turquoise waters. The boats sit at anchor – the beach is sociable with pleasure-seekers in white and red, with parasols. It is a picture that murmurs – low voices, the slight exhale of water over the shingle at low tide.

Take his glorious later oil sketch Shoreham Bay, (May 1828, above), of a sunset over a view west across the Downs. Looking at it gives you a sense of height as well as flatness. The border between the land and the sea is hazy. Constable’s strokes favour the horizon, flat swathes of green and ridges of blue in the distance, a white-hot sun sinking over the burnished patina of sky. I’d swear Constable was standing on Hollingbury Hill – then without the golfers that drag their clubs across the soggy green, of course, but with the ancient hill fort still underfoot, and views beyond Shoreham to the Isle of Wight, and even, on a good day, as far as Portsmouth.

If painting was, as Constable said, the business of making ‘something out of nothing’, the changeable nothingness of clouds has left a surprisingly long shadow. We don’t need help to admire sunrises, sunsets, or balmy days; storms, unideal skies, do need framing for us to go out in them, to live without being oppressed by them. In addition to being virtuosic responses to a series of unstable moments, Constable’s oil sketches of Brighton beach offer a way of seeing weather as existing apart from our experience of it. From Hollingbury Hill, the exhibition of flying shadows goes on, whatever the weather.

Turner & Constable: Rivals & Originals is on at Tate Britain until April 12, 2026