Wind, Rain And Sunshine

Wind, Rain and Sunshine, painted in 1845 and held in Aberdeen Archives, Gallery and Museums, is among the most explicitly meteorological of all David Cox's canvases — a painting in which three different weather conditions are simultaneously present in the landscape, creating the kind of complex, rapidly changing atmosphere that characterises Atlantic Britain. Cox was obsessed with the moment when weather transitions: when sunshine breaks through rain, when wind drives clouds across a gap of blue, when the landscape is simultaneously lit and shadowed. This painting announces its ambition in its title, presenting itself not as a landscape scene but as a study in weather itself. Aberdeen's museum, far to the north in Scotland where weather is precisely this changeable and dramatic, provides a congenial institutional setting. The 1845 date places this at the height of Cox's atmospheric experimentation, when he was developing the coarse-paper technique that would characterise his most expressive late work.

The technical challenge of painting simultaneous wind, rain, and sunshine required Cox to construct the composition as a sequence of atmospheric zones: a dark rain-shadow area, a wind-agitated transitional zone, and a sun-lit break. His brushwork is at its most varied here — heavy loaded strokes for rain, directional sweeping marks for wind, and careful warm illumination for the sunshine passages.