‘Chasing Clouds’ opens at the Met: two centuries of art in pursuit of the sky, from Constable to Stieglitz

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York opened the exhibition “Chasing Clouds” on Sunday, which will run through February 28, 2027, as the Metropolitan Museum announced. The exhibition brings together works from the museum’s own collection — by John Constable, Eugène Delacroix, Gustave Le Gray, John Singer Sargent and Alfred Stieglitz — and traces artists’ efforts, between 1800 and 1920, to capture one of nature’s most elusive subjects: clouds.

In the early 19th century, just as meteorologists began to study and for the first time classify clouds, landscape painters went outdoors to sketch the sky directly, “en plein air”. Among the exhibition’s curiosities is the small blue-tinted “Claude mirror” — its slightly convex surface was held over the shoulder so the landscape behind appeared reflected, compressed and in deeper colors. It was used by artists, but also by tourists — long before the camera arrived, man was finding ways to turn the world into an image before looking at it.

Photography, from the 1830s, promised to capture the sky with unprecedented speed and detail, but early technical limitations betrayed the promise: photographers were forced to paint the sky onto the negative or manually combine different negatives, until chemical and optical advances in the early 20th century made cloud photographs that rivaled painting.

The exhibition, curated by Stephen C. Pinson, closes the circle in the 1920s with Alfred Stieglitz’s “Equivalents” — the series of cloud studies that reconciles poetic feeling with naturalistic depiction. “While artists have long depicted clouds and the sky, the early 19th century brought a renewed fascination, inspired by both scientific and artistic study,” museum director Max Hollein said, adding that the exhibition “reflects the deep and enduring dialogue between art, science and technology over time.” The exhibition is supported by the Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw Charitable Trust.