At first light, the project of classifying the clouds might seem a bit uninspired, if useful. Not so for Luke Howard (1772–1864), industrial chemist by trade and amateur meteorologist by calling, whose 1803 Essay on the Modification of Clouds records the fruits of a fervent, lifelong dedication to skygazing. It was long thought impossible to infer clear types from the constantly shifting skies. But based on the journals he’d kept since the age of ten, Howard became the first to name standard cloud formations systematically. We still use the Latin names he chose today: cirrus (from the Latin for a wisp of hair), cumulus (“convex or conical heaps”), stratus (a “horizontal sheet”), and nimbus (the rain cloud). The project was not only a meteorological breakthrough, but yielded sketchbooks filled with wind-swept watercolors and inspired a new generation of landscape painters. Years later, Howard earned the surprising distinction of being named in a poem by Goethe.

Howard’s accomplishment was to discern organization in the apparently aleatory. “If Clouds were the mere result of the condensation of Vapour in the masses of atmosphere which they occupy . . . then indeed might the study of them be deemed an useless pursuit of shadows”, Howard allows. But with an intellectual conviction born from decades lost in the clouds, he argues that “the principal Modifications are commonly as distinguishable from each other as a Tree from a Hill, or the latter from a Lake.” If they are to discern the patterns he describes, Howard writes, his readers must also commit themselves to frequent observation.

Goethe, too, saw the sublime in scientific classification. Translated into German in 1815, Howard’s essay crystallized Goethe’s own study of the skies. Goethe corresponded with the younger Englishman, writing a poem that was reproduced, untranslated, in the essay’s 1865 third edition. In the opening stanzas, Goethe exalts the beauty of the overcast sky, and the clear-sightedness of the man who parsed it:

Then boldly stirs imagination’s power,
And shapes there formless masses of the hour;
Here lions threat, there elephants will range,
And camel-necks to vapoury dragons change;
An army moves, but not in victory proud,
Its might is broken on a rock of cloud;
E’en the cloud messenger in air expires,
Ere reach’d the distance fancy yet desires.

But Howard gives us with his clearer mind
The gain of lessons new to all mankind;
That which no hand can reach,
no hand can clasp,
He first has gain’d, first
held with mental grasp.
Defin’d the doubtful, fix’d its limit-line,
And named it fitly. —Be the honour thine!
As clouds ascend, are folded, scatter, fall,
Let the world think of thee who taught it all.

Howard illustrated his essay, collaborating with the painter Edward Kennion (1744–1809) to depict hulking nimbus and wispy cirrus over picturesque landscapes. Though evocative, the prints lack the delicacy of Howard’s earlier cloud studies: delicate watercolors that evoke the shifting skies in dynamic beige, blue, and pale gray splashes. The sketches reflect the “many years Howard spent travelling between London and the Lake District, writes curator Boris Jardine, evidence of a Romantic artistic practice closely intertwined with his taxonomic one. In the spirit of Goethe’s “delicate empiricism” (zarte Empirie) and the Romantic conviction in the power of first-hand observation, Howard is at pains to “warn the young student of Meteorology” against leaning too heavily on the engraved images. “A correct comprehension of the subject”, he writes, “is only to be obtained by a habitual observation of Nature”.

Goethe, a student of Howard himself, expresses his gratitude for the general forms Howard outlines: airy archetypes that allow him to move beyond “certain indistinct appearances” and identify the “main rules under which they come”. As poet and naturalist, he may have been the best person to answer the question: can imposing order onto the ether lead, counterintuitively, toward the transcendental?