An interwoven mass of clouds plays across the surface of the oil sketch that John Constable (1776-1837) completed on August 1, 1822 (fig. 1 / M). This vaporous matter, crested with white, is charged with a sense of visual and material mobility that appears unheeding even of the picture's boundaries. Such an image exemplifies the sense of the sky, as the critic William Hazlitt wrote in 1824, as "that endless airy space, where the eye wanders at liberty." 1 Yet to look too closely at the clouds might somewhat miss the point. Indeed, if we turn Constable's oil sketch over, we find the painter's faded ink notations, which record the conditions of the study's making: "11 O clock A.M / very hot with large climbing clouds / under the sun. / Wind westerly." Such descriptions of the artist's sensory experiences, found on many of his oil sketches, suggest that Constable saw clouds instead as indices of larger aerial movements of matter and energy, situated in a continuum of marked time and spatial extension. 2 Thus, the seemingly unmediated, momentary visual "liberty" inscribed on the painted surface is secured to a more extended form of observation, iterated across the dozens of oil sketches Constable completed in the early 1820s, in which momentary sensations are coordinated and anchored in place and time. 3 The bifurcated descriptive systems on the verso and recto of Constable's cloud study might be seen to represent a wider issues. How does momentary sensory experience relate to systems that spread beyond the frame and scale of representability? What does painting have to 2 do with data? 4 Climate change has engendered just such a crisis of perception: a confrontation with the impossibility of seeing, let alone representing or comprehending, a multivalent ecological disaster operating across the planet on an extra-human scale. 5 At the same time, the presently unfolding manifestations of climate crisis-catastrophic floods, droughts, intensified storms-are inescapably and violently present, especially to those made particularly vulnerable to its effects by the unequal ecological legacies of colonialism. 6 As I will argue, similar problems-of reconciling larger temporal and geographic scales with more immediate sensory experience-attended early nineteenth-century attempts to represent climate itself. As opposed to the transient, local phenomenon of weather, climate would increasingly be defined in the developing scientific discipline of meteorology as a calculated abstraction fashioned from longterm aggregation of empirical data. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, artists and scientists fashioned new modes of visual representation adequate to climate's elusive forms.The work of Constable and of the meteorologist Luke Howard (1772-1864) exemplify such experiments. The relationship between the artist and the scientist has been subject to a decades-long debate. The animating question is whether or not Howard's meteorological theories and, in particular, the cloud classifications he proposed in 1803, influenc...

During three weeks in January 1862, the painter Fitz Henry Lane (1804-1865) completedStage Fort across Gloucester Harbour in his granite home and studio in Gloucester, Massachusetts (fig. 1). 1 The flat plane of Gloucester's Outer Harbour is enclosed by the shoreline curving around the painting's right edge, culminating in the rocky promontory known as Stage Fort. In the foreground, two men talk beside a battered canoe, while our attention is directed by the mast lying on the beach to a small sloop being poled to shore, and further out, to a schooner at anchor and to the lighthouse at the harbour's farthest edge. 'The sea is calm', a Gloucester journalist wrote of the painting upon viewing it in Lane's studio: 'the mellow sunset light throws a charm over the whole scene, mirroring in the glassy deep the rock-bound shore, and vessels on its surface'. 2 Each object-whether body, ship, rope, or rock-has found its place. This sense of serene equanimity has shaped Lane's historical reputation ever since, in the mid-twentieth century, he was re-introduced into the narrative of nineteenth-century American landscape painting. In his formative 1954 article on Lane and his contemporary painters, curator John I. H. Baur drew upon Henry James's short story 'A Landscape Painter' (1866) to find language for this painterly quietude-quoting a passage in which James's protagonist-artist looks upon 'deep, translucent water' in which 'mossy rocks doubled themselves without a flaw in the clear, dark water'. The narrator identifies in the landscape before him 'a lightness, a brilliance, a crudity, which allows perfect liberty of self-assertion to each object in the landscape '. 3 Accounts of Lane's work have tended to emphasize the 'lightness' and 'brilliance' of his landscapes at the expense of their 'crudity'. Take the rocks in Stage Fort.

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