Cloud studies

Charles Piazzi Smyth, Scottish Astronomer Royal, who, besides being a great astronomer, bequeathed the world the notion that the measurements of the Great Pyramid at Gizeh are in some way significant, and resigned from the Royal Society when they refused to take him seriously, spent his retirement at Ripon in Yorkshire taking photographs of clouds. He is reportedly buried there under a pyramid, with a camera, and so may be supposed to be taking photographs of clouds in the afterlife (a rather hazy, unsettling concept). His father, a naval man, had also been an astronomer, and named his son "Piazzi" after Giuseppe Piazzi, who discovered the first asteroid.

This peculiar and somewhat vertigininous image, found at The Egypt Archive, is from one of Smyth's books on the Great Pyramid:

There are two paintings of his, showing the Great Comet of 1843, in the collection of the National Maritime Museum.

A greater English painter, and a great studier of clouds, John Constable, possessed a copy of Thomas Forster's book Researches about Atmospheric Phenomena which, so we are told, "appears to have been immersed in water, or perhaps drenched by a heavy shower" (according to John E. Thorne's fascinating study John Constable's Skies).

I own a book called A Book of Clouds, by one William A. Quayle, published in 1925, full of appropriately cloudy purple prose such as:

Ruby, garnet, zircon, carbuncle all melted together would have fused scanter crimson than the flame I saw. But alas the Revelator was not there! Just above the wild catastrophe of lurid cinder recumbent...

I quote out of context, and have broken off mid-sentence, but I can assure you the passage, like most of the rest of Quayle's writing, makes scarcely any more sense if you know, for example, who or what "the Revelator" might be, or can fight your way through the recumbent redundancies to the end of what is a merely average Quayle sentence. Rearrange the words in any order you like, and it makes scarcely less sense. It's wonderful stuff.

This, by the way, is the frontispiece to Quayle's book.

May I direct blogosphere cognoscenti to the attribution?

Oh boynton, thou Revelator with light's pencil of the far Antipodean welkin...