In the Gallery of the Ordinary

In their excess, their blowsy dreaming and King Solomon-like tempers, the clouds possess the grandeur of eighteenth-century oils, when a painter earned his profession as an anatomist. Those artists of verdigris and gamboge, too gorged on joy, perhaps, treated that blank pasture of the “heavens” like something that had lived. Their crawly undoings remind us of the mean curiosities of sheep, the sea’s half-remembered boil, or a few twisted bolls of cotton—the morning phosphorescent or sunset a dull, worn-out gilt. The nights there were scumbled with light. How could we ever have taken them for the abstinence of art?