Under the rain. Painting, living, dreaming

Drizzle, mist, squall, shower or downpour, cloudburst, pelting rain and deluge: it is raining at the Nantes museum (ill. 1). And one cannot even rely on Noah [1] to keep one’s feet dry, nor on Jupiter to receive a few drops of gold: they were not invited. Neither punishment nor divine seduction: the Nantes rain is not celestial, it is atmospheric.

The exhibition curators have chosen to begin the itinerary in the nineteenth century, with the development of plein-air painting, and to focus their argument on the pictorial challenge that falls with the water from the sky: how does one represent a translucent, colourless, ephemeral element which nonetheless blurs forms, darkens the horizon and alters the perception of a landscape? Some painters, such as Gustave Courbet (ill. 2), opted for impasto, while others, like Eugène Boudin, preferred fluid brushwork and vaporous effects.

One hundred and fifty works recount a moment in the history of art, but also a social history — that of the modern city and its great boulevards enlivened by the new fashion accessory that was the umbrella — as well as a scientific history, with the development of meteorology. As early as 1802, Luke Howard set about describing clouds and establishing a typology. Camille Flammarion, for his part, published several scientific works based on his studies of skies, notably L’Atmosphère météorologie populaire in 1888, while André des Gachons, a painter and amateur meteorologist, produced more than 9,000 watercolours of skies, accompanied by atmospheric and…