Jean-Michel Cels, 'Sky Study with Birds', 1842

Skies and clouds have fascinated artists for centuries. Their appearance in portraits and narrative works has been used symbolically, to give viewers clues as to how to understand the actions of the people. As landscape evolved as a genre in its own right, an appreciation of clouds for their own sake began to develop. The Dutch seventeenth-century painter Willem van de Velde is reported to have made studies of clouds. In 1708 the French art critic Roger de Piles recommended that artists should sketch clouds at different times of the day and in various weather conditions. In Britain, the landscape artist John Constable made detailed studies of clouds on Hampstead Heath.

Jean-Michel Cels was born in The Hague in the Netherlands in 1819. His father Cornelis Cels, also a painter, was the director of the Academie de Tournai. When he was young, Cornelis had travelled in Italy for seven years. He visited Naples and Florence but spent most of his time in Rome. Cornelis produced many open-air landscape oil sketches. He was particularly interested in skies and clouds. Jean-Michel therefore grew up surrounded by artistic inspiration. He learnt directly from his father and from the sketches he had made in Italy. Jean-Michel received formal training at the workshop of the Belgian Romantic landscape artist Pierre-Jean Hellemans. Hellemans often painted scenes of Belgium, including panoramic skyscapes.

In 1847 Jean-Michel followed in his father’s footsteps and travelled to Italy. However, his journey was only brief and he was back in Belgium the following year. This work is signed and dated 1842, showing that he was interested in clouds before his Italian visit, perhaps having seen his father’s oil sketches. As with most landscape oil sketches, it would have been created as a tool to be used in more fully worked-up oil paintings made in the studio. There is an inscription on the reverse. It records that Cels used copal varnish thinned with turpentine mixed into his paints. He wanted to record how he had achieved the effects in the sketch so that they could be repeated in a larger oil painting. Copal varnish was favoured by artists in the nineteenth century, as it brought out the colours and stiffened the paint, allowing for more gestural brushwork.

Most landscape sketches produced outdoors rely on the artist working swiftly to capture rapidly changing effects of light and shade. This is even more the case when attempting to depict the fleeting movements of cloud formations. Cels focused entirely on the sky; there are no elements of land in the composition. The viewer is cast adrift in the immensity of the sky without a tether to the land. We are flying in much the same way as the birds in the sketch.