Epilogue II: The Constables, 2021

Epilogue II: The Constables, 2021

I discovered these seven photographs in the basement of the Abu Dhabi Louvre Museum. When I inquired about them, I was told that seven of the 131 Old Master Paintings acquired by the museum had back-paintings of clouds. They were discovered in 2012 by Lamia Antonova, the best art restorer of her generation. Antonova discovered them when the paintings were X-Rayed for the first time. Since this discovery, Abu Dhabi has forbidden anyone from looking at the paintings’ fronts. Moreover, they have forbidden any additional X-Rays, and even the display of the objects themselves. Only these photographs are permitted to go on display. What we know about the back paintings today is that they were painted in the 1820s, and they look exactly like the cloud studies made by the nineteenth-century British painter, John Constable. Constable was an early meteorologist, and he wanted clouds to look real in his paintings, not like puffy cotton balls. Between 1820 and 1822, he made over 100 beautiful sketches of clouds. But as far as we know, he painted only once on the back of another painting, and that painting is in the Tate. So, who did this? We don’t know. Are they Constables? We don’t know. Why clouds? We dont know.