Constable’s wife, Maria, developed tuberculosis soon after their marriage. By 1818 her illness had prompted them to rent a house at the airy village of Hampstead, on the northern slopes above London. Here the family stayed for long periods and Constable was introduced to a new landscape of horizontal vistas, huge skies and extensive views over the Heath. The rural economy of this area was based on quarrying rather than agriculture, contrasting with the contained, undulating, arable landscape of the Stour Valley, the subject of so many of Constable’s earlier landscapes. In 1821, after he converted a small shed in the garden into a workshop, Constable began his ‘skying’ – a systematic series of oil studies of changing skies at Hampstead Heath. In the summer of 1822 he painted about fifty studies of clouds. In these sky studies Constable captured the passing effects of changing light and atmospheric effects. He inscribed them with the time of day, date, wind direction and weather conditions under which they were painted, and his inscriptions and the official weather conditions recorded for that day often coincide completely. No other artist of the time (with the exception of perhaps Turner) emphasised the importance of these transient natural phenomena. Many just used the sky as a backdrop; however, for Constable the sky was, as he stated, a ‘key note’ and ‘standard of Scale’, it was the ‘Chief organ of Sentiment’. Constable often discussed his belief in the expressive importance of the sky in his paintings, and its ability to dictate the mood of a landscape. He stated: ‘The sky is the “source of light” in nature – and governs everything’. Question • Examine the skies in all of the paintings in this resource. If the skies were plain blue, how would this alter the mood of the paintings?