Cloud perspective: curvilinear

From Modern Painters, Vol. V, Plate L65.
This series of diagrams was used by Ruskin in his fifth and final volume of Modern Painters (1860) to illustrate the use of geometric compositional rulings in drawing curved shapes – in particular, the application of perspective to the depiction of clouds. He believed that a firm grasp of the rules of proportion and perspective was necessary to capture ‘the expression of buoyancy and space in sky’ (LE 7 (1905)/156).
In his instruction manual ‘Elements of Drawing’, he explained: ‘All drawing depends, primarily, on your power of representing Roundness. If you can once do that, all the rest is easy and straightforward; if you cannot do that, nothing else that you may be able to do will be of any use. For Nature is all made up of roundnesses; not the roundness of 25 perfect globes, but of variously curved surfaces. Boughs are rounded, leaves are rounded, stones are rounded, clouds are rounded, cheeks are rounded, and curls are rounded: there is no more flatness in the natural world than there is vacancy.’ (LE 15 (1904)/50).
Clouds also offered a model of permanently changing natural world. Ruskin argued that the power of drawing to understand the clouds ‘alters and renders clear our whole conception of the architecture of the sky.’ By contrast, he often parodied scientific experimentation to the same end as in Storm Clouds: ‘If you watch the steam coming strongly out of an engine-funnel, at the top of the funnel it is transparent, you can't see it, though it is more densely and intensely there than anywhere else. Six inches out of the funnel it becomes snow-white, you see it, and you see it, observe, exactly where it is, it is then a real and proper cloud. Twenty yards off the funnel it scatters and melts away; a little of it sprinkles you with rain if you are underneath it, but the rest disappears; yet it is still there; the surrounding air does not absorb it all into space in a moment; there is a gradually diffusing current of invisible moisture at the end of the visible stream—an invisible, yet quite substantial, vapor; but not, according to our definition, a cloud, for a cloud is vapor visible.’ LE 34 (1908)/16).

Ruskin’s technical drawings illustrate his precision skills as a draughtsman and scientific thinker. In his autobiography, Praeterita (1885 – 1889), he warns against dismissing either aspect of his work, writing, ‘the interwoven temper of my mind which has always made foolish scientific readers doubt my books because there was love of beauty in them, and foolish aesthetic readers doubt my books because there was a love of science in them’ (LE 35 (1908)/56).