One afternoon this past July, I saw amazing clouds in the western sky—reminiscent of those painted by the English artist John Constable. Several minutes later, I viewed images of the Constable clouds on my computer monitor. Living in London, Constable went out on Hampstead Heath and painted clouds at different times of the day from July through September, 1822. Living in Toronto, I went out on my third-floor deck and photographed clouds at different times of the day from July through September, 2015. Constable’s fascination with clouds was nurtured by the concept of aerial nature proposed by Luke Howard’s Essay on the Modification of Clouds (1803). Cirrus, cumulus, stratus, and nimbus were the four general categories of clouds. After a presentation to the Askesian Society, his work was published in Philosophical Magazine, the best known science journal in Europe. His classification caught the imagination of a number of prominent people. Goethe was so impressed that he wrote an essay (Cloud Shapes According to Howard) and a poem about each of the four cloud types; he felt that the classification established man’s relationship with aerial nature. Howard’s work also inspired landscape paintings by Constable and Turner and Shelley’s poem The Cloud. Hugo Hildebrand Hildebrandsson, director of the meteorological observatory at Uppsala University (1878–1907), was the first to use photography in the study and classification of cloud forms (1879) and introduced the idea of a cloud atlas. Alfred Stieglitz took a number of cloud photographs (1920s) which he called Songs of the Sky initially and later Equivalents. Stieglitz’s abstract forms captured what Minor White called Spirit—“No matter how slow the film, Spirit always stands still long enough for the photographer it has chosen”. Stieglitz sought the inner spirit in outer things. The Beauty of Clouds celebrates the Spirit of clouds in the western sky.