John Constable was fortunate as painters go. Born in Suffolk in 1776, he was the son of a relatively wealthy miller who had ambitions for his son within the family business.
Nothing, however, would do young John but be an artist, and so Constable pere relented and sent the lad to study in London at the Royal Academy.
Recognition was slow to come at first, but when three of Constable's paintings were exhibited to rapturous acclaim at the Paris Salon in 1824, his reputation was assured.
That, combined with the incidental benefits of an inheritance of £20,000, allowed him to concentrate on painting landscapes for the remainder of his life.
In search of excellence in his genre, Constable was meticulous in his meteorology and his skies in particular were the product of many years of careful study.
In the summers of 1821 and 1822, for example, he produced a series of detailed oil sketches devoted exclusively to clouds: some 50 of these remain extant, each carefully inscribed on the back with the time of day, the direction of the wind and other memoranda relevant to the weather at the time.
It was a subject on which he liked to wax eloquent from time to time. "I have done a good deal of skying," he wrote to a friend in October 1821. "I am determined to conquer all difficulties and that most arduous one among the rest.
"The landscape painter who does not make his skies a very material part of his compositions neglects to avail himself of one of his greatest aids. The difficulties are very great both as to composition and execution: with all their brilliancy, skies ought not to come forward - indeed they should be hardly thought of, any more than extreme distances are - but this does not apply to phenomena or accidental effects of the sky because they always particularly attract the eye."
Because he learned his craft so carefully, Constable is much approved of in weather circles. His clouds are seen as scientifically accurate and as excelling in their dynamic quality, incorporating always a subtle intimation of continuing change.
Some meteorologists find it odd that although he painted a multitude of showery scenes showing well-developed cumulonimbus clouds, he produced no known example of a cumulonimbus which had reached the decadent "anvil" stage of its development.
On the other hand, he was one of the earliest painters to recognise the influence of topography on the shapes of clouds.
John Constable died suddenly, 162 years ago today on March 31st, 1837.