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In his book about the sky in art, The Soul of All Scenery, Dr. Stan Gedzelman (Member 28,872) demonstrates what a great cloudspotter the French impressionist painter Claude Monet was. Monet’s 1867 paintings of the beach at Sainte-Adresse in Normandy, France are two of his most insightful meteorological works.Regatta at Sainte-Adresse and The Beach at Sainte-Adresse were likely started on the same June day. They both show the same stretch of beach, changed only by the tideline and the shifting sky and light brought by an arriving weather front. Fair-weather Cumulus in the bright Regatta painting appear beneath a telltale layer of high Cirrostratus cloud encroaching from the west, a classic sign in this region that a weather front is approaching. The duller light of his Beach painting likely shows the scene a few hours later. Now the sky is darkening with Stratocumulus clouds beneath a thickened layer of Altostratus. Rain is on its way.‘I hypothesize,’ writes Stan, ‘that Monet began sketching the Regatta under bright skies, without anticipating a second work. But then the sky changed before his eyes, altering the appearance of all the landscape features profoundly, and compelling the alert artist to undertake a second… version of the scene.’Welcome to the challenge of sky painting: no sooner have you got on a roll than you find that the damn thing’s changed.The sunnier Regatta at Sainte-Adresse (1867) and the cloudier The Beach at Sainte-Adresse (1867) by Claude Monet are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, US and the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois, US respectively. A PDF of The Soul of All Scenery by Stan Gedzelman is available free at stanrenaissanceman.com.