photo #6244013

John Bauer was a Swedish illustrator and painter working in the early twentieth century. He was interested in mythology and is best known for his illustrations in early volumes of Among Gnomes and Trolls, an anthology annual of Swedish folk tales. But Bauer was also a landscape painter with a keen interest in nature, having spent a lot of time in the deep Swedish forests as a child. He applied his observations of nature to his illustrations of fantasy worlds. In this watercolour painting titled Into the Wide Wide World (1907), a boy prince on horseback, complete with an oversized broadsword, stands against a backdrop of accurate clouds. We can see at the bottom right a towering Cumulus congestus cloud looking like it will soon develop into a fully fledged storm. Low Stratocumulus clouds are stretching across the horizon beyond. Sweeping across the centre of the sky is a band of Altocumulus perlucidus, the variety of this mid-level cloud that has clear gaps between its cloudlets. And, finally, in the top-left corner are what appear to be fragmented patches of the high ice-crystal cloud Cirrus. There’s nothing mythical about this mixed sky of low, mid-level, and high clouds.