The Cloud, Florence, Sull'Arno, Italy

Elihu Vedder's 'The Cloud, Florence, Sull'Arno, Italy' (1885) belongs to his Italian atmospheric subjects — the American Symbolist painter who lived primarily in Rome also painted the landscapes and atmospheric conditions of the Italian peninsula, finding in the particular quality of Italian light and sky subjects that matched his interest in the border between the natural and the visionary. A cloud over the Arno offered Vedder the combination of specific topography and atmospheric phenomenon that engaged his imagination — the cloud as both natural fact and symbolic presence.

Vedder renders the Florentine sky and the Arno valley below with the careful, somewhat linear precision of his Italian formation — forms clearly defined even within the atmospheric subject of cloud and sky. His handling creates a quality of luminous intensity within the Italian landscape that differs from both the Impressionist dissolution of atmospheric painting and the academic clarity of topographic view. The cloud's presence in the specific Florentine context gives the painting its characteristic Vedder quality of the mythological inhabiting the actual.