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The Art of Innovation

The Art of Innovation: Observing the Air

Observing the Air

BBC Radio 4 - The Art of Innovation, Observing the Air

Ian Blatchford and Tilly Blyth on how artists and naturalists depicted and defined clouds

Sir Ian Blatchford and Dr Tilly Blyth on challenges by Romantic artists and naturalists to grapple with cloud patterns, from Constable's fine art to a new science of meteorology

Sir Ian Blatchford and Dr Tilly Blyth continue their series exploring how art and science have inspired each other, from the Enlightenment to Dark Matter. 

They focus on the long tradition by artists and naturalists to capture and define the untamed patterns of clouds in all their short lived states.

Ian and Tilly visit Paddington's Crossrail Station where they look up at clouds most recently interpreted in Spencer Finch’s A Cloud Index (2019), which depicts different types of clouds on a vast glass canopy. It pays homage to the work of the Romantic landscape painters and their time when imaginative and rational inquiry were becoming allies. 

Ian reveals that John Constable was one of the first to paint these ethereal assemblages of water vapour with a remarkable understanding of cloud movement and structure as a result of his intense "skying" sessions during the 1820s on Hampstead Heath. Constable believed art could shed certainty on science - and he coincidentally added weight to the new science of meteorology and the work of amateur weather watcher Luke Howard, whose new classification scheme is depicted in sketches and watercolours on loan from the Royal Meteorological Society.

As Tilly Blyth illustrates, Howard's sketches and classifications cleverly captured a sense of endless mutating forms which, despite restricting the imaginative shaping by the influential Romantic intellects, meant an infinite variety of cloud forms could now be grasped by anyone. For Constable, elusive cloud shapes could be captured without any conscious shape-making taking place.


Producer Adrian Washbourne

Produced in partnership with the Science Museum Group

Photograph by Ashmolean Museum/Heritage Images/Getty Images

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How art and science have inspired each other.

Sir Ian Blatchford and Dr Tilly Blyth explore how art and science have inspired each other.

In this landmark series, art historian and Director of the Science Museum Ian Blatchford and technology historian and Head of Collections of the Science Museum Tilly Blyth explore the art of invention and the invention of art and reveal the symbiotic relationship between the two. Many feel science takes the magic out of creativity. These programmes show how scientific advance facilitates creativity. And further, how artistic and scientific endeavour are inspired by the same desires and, often, are the result of intimate conversations between good friends. Galileo's painter friend Ludovicio Cigoli paints a maculate moon on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel and what does Galileo see when he looks through his telescope? A maculate moon. The poet Samuel Coleridge and the chemist Humphrey Davy were very close friends. Scientific innovators are creative thinkers. And the creation of art is dependent on technological development, as well as an aesthetic sense. Throughout history, artists and scientists have both desired to make sense of the world around them and change it, 

Produced in partnership with The Science Museum Group. 

Image credit: Science Museum Group Collection © The Board of Trustees of the Science Museum.

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