Clouds draw the eye not only through their distance and elusiveness, but through their shapes and colours. Landscape painters more often place them along the horizon, where sky and earth dissolve into one another and the horizon becomes an invitation to travel. Yet many artists fixed their attention on clouds directly, using the delicate wash of watercolour to stage scenes as alternative to earthly events. The intimate genre of watercolour drawing allowed them to relate to the changing scenes both charming and dramatic – a world apart from earthly events. The intimacy of the medium allowed them to respond to the shifting sky in the moment, and to turn the act of painting into a form of meditation.

There is something characteristic in the fact that Baudelaire’s stranger, in the opening poem of Petits Poèmes en prose, declares his love for the clouds – a confession met with incomprehension by the society. For him, the clouds were bound up with a true home: a place of consolation and fulfilment. These deepen when the heavens become inhabited by the souls of the dead. St. Thérèse of Lisieux called the sky the “crystal clear back” of Heaven, and in contemplating it she experienced a vivid sense of eternity already lived – more real, she felt, than an ordinary tomorrow that may never come.