Eric Sloane and the Sky

If you are familiar with the work of Eric Sloane (1905-1985), then you already appreciate how clouds and the sky were central motifs in nearly every one of his paintings.  Eric Sloane was a prolific American artist perhaps best known for his work chronicling Early American rural life and culture.  He worked hard to become an accomplished landscape painter, and it was Sloane’s depictions of clouds and the sky that made everything he painted realistic, breathtaking, and uniquely his own. 

As a teen, Sloane exhibited a penchant for wandering, often covering great distances.  He once absconded with his father’s Model T Ford, even forging the license plates for the vehicle.  His escapades across the United States provided him with countless memories, later immortalized in both writing and paint. Along his journeys, he bartered his artistic skills for necessities, exchanging menu lettering for meals and painting signs and even murals for lodging. Particularly in Taos, New Mexico, already a burgeoning artist enclave, Sloane honed his craft through sketching and painting. In was in Taos, Eric recalled, that he fell in love with the sky. When planning his return to New York City, Sloane decided that he would return as an artist.    

Upon his return to New York City, Sloane found employment as a muralist and sign painter at Coney Island Amusement Park. His lodging at the Half Moon Hotel facilitated encounters with notable aviators frequenting Roosevelt Field, including Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart. Sloane soon found himself undertaking odd jobs within the aviation community, gradually incorporating airplanes into his artwork against the backdrop of expansive cloudscapes. Some of these works he sold, others he traded for flights in airplanes so that he could become more skilled at painting clouds and the sky.  It was flying with Wiley Post one day that the famed aviation pioneer looked at Eric and said, “You know, someday a fellow will come along and paint nothing but the sky”.  Eric decided to be “that fellow” and began painting “cloudscapes”, a term he asserted he coined.  Some were massive.  As the clouds loomed larger in his paintings, the airplanes became smaller until there was nothing in Sloane’s paintings but clouds and sky. 

At lunch one day at the Roosevelt Field Inn, Eric showed his companion a large, foreboding storm he had painted.  His luncheon companion was little moved – “Why”, he asked, “would anyone one want to buy a painting of just clouds”?  Undaunted, Eric hung the painting on the restaurant wall, replete with a price tag upon which Eric wrote “an exorbitant sum”.  Emelia Earnhardt bought the painting. 

In the early 1930s, Eric met Barbara Lawrence, their dates consisting of watching planes fly in and out of Roosevelt Field.  Eric and Barbara were married (Sloane was married a total of 6 times), and a contemporary newspaper article reported that she learned to fly so that Eric could spend more time in the air sketching clouds.  “I take him up in my plane and watch him make color notes for his paintings.  And on every trip, day or night, I really do have a wonderful time”. 

 As America began to mobilize for the Second World War, unsurprisingly Eric concentrated on illustrating and painting military aircraft.  He combined his burgeoning understanding of meteorology with his illustrative abilities, authoring several articles for aviation magazines of the period.  He contributed to several books including Ernest Vetter’s Let’s Fly: An ABC of Flying (1940), as well as Assen Jordanoff ‘s Your Wings (1942). Sloane had published his first book, Clouds, Air and Wind through the Devin-Adair Company in 1941.  The United States Army Air Corps took note.  Eric contributed to several manuals for training pilots, many of whom were barely out of high school.  His illustrative style – one that tended towards “comic” and informal, yet deceptively simple drawings full important details – turned out to be a great learning aid to the young recruits.

During the war, Sloane was commissioned by the parents of a Naval aviator killed on a training mission to create a series of articulated models of weather phenomenon.  Their son, Lt. Prentice Willets, was piloting a plane that went down in heavy weather, killing all twelve airmen on board.  The weather models Sloane created were quite ingenious and were eventually installed in Hayden Planetarium in 1951.    

After the war, Sloane enrolled in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s meteorology program, but found the mathematics needed was too difficult and besides, the program lacked the “romance of the weather”.  He forged his own path that involved a mixture of weather folklore, self-taught meteorology, and of course refining his illustrative style relative to clouds, the sky, and weather.  His weather-related books are a departure from the more didactic titles he wrote in the 1940’s – now they were written in a more personal, informal style.  Eric Sloane’s Weather Book (1949), Skies and the Artist (1950), Eric Sloane’s Almanac and Weather Forecaster (1955), Book of Storms (1956), Look at the Sky (1961), Folklore of American Weather (1963), and For Spacious Skies (1978) read less like training manuals (which, in Sloane’s defense, his works published in the 1940s were intended to be), and more like listening to a kind uncle explain the weather. 

With his Yankee work ethic, Sloane painted while he wrote, sometimes quite literally. His landscapes – while ostensibly of barns and covered bridges – were tour de forces in the artist’s rendering of the power and beauty of clouds, the sky and the atmosphere in oils.   Recognized as America’s foremost painter of the sky, Sloane was commissioned in 1976 to create a mural for the Independence Avenue lobby of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.  The 75’ long mural, entitled Earth Flight Environment, depicts the beautiful complexities of our planet’s atmospheric environment. 

It was his study of the weather that introduced the life and work of the early American farmer to Sloane, setting the artist on yet another path of painting barns, covered bridges, and rural landscapes later in his career.  He worked hard throughout his career to become a best-selling author and a highly respected illustrator, as well as enjoying a lucrative career as a fine artist with an international reputation – all within his lifetime.  No matter what the subject of his paintings however, clouds and the sky were never merely a backdrop for Sloane – they were always the subject. 

– With our thanks to author Wil Mauch. Wil adapted this article for our website based on a work he created for the Cloud Appreciation Society. Images used by permission.