Dark, swirling clouds loom over a narrow strip of land, gently punctuated by far-off

trees and a city skyline. The place is Rome. The weather: an impending rainstorm.
The day: a late afternoon within the last decades of the 1700s.

This painting is one in a series of cloud studies--in fact the forty-eighth--that Simon
Denis made to hone his observational and painting skills. Denis's confident paint
handling and sensitive rendering of light capture the awe-inspiring power of nature.
Using a warm palette, he juxtaposed light and dark tones to imply both the clouds'
airy buoyancy and moisture-laden heaviness. Lively brushstrokes convey the
constantly shifting forces of wind and light.

This dramatic cloudscape predates by a century the Impressionists' celebration of

outdoor landscape painting in which they recorded specific, yet fleeting, effects of
weather and time and exhibited those results as finished paintings. But in Denis's
time, oil sketching on paper while outdoors offered the artist an opportunity to test
and sharpen his skills. Denis would have kept his cloud studies in the studio for
future reference for his finished paintings.