Cloud study, Hampstead, trees at right  11 September 1821
oil on paper laid on board
Royal Academy of Arts, London, gift of Isabel Constable in 1888

This is one of the earliest of Constable’s cloud studies in which he included a margin of land or treetops along the bottom of the image. Here, he depicted the sunlight catching the tops of the small cumulus clouds. He used long, sweeping brush strokes in the upper right to express the movement of the clouds in the wind.