Cloud painting by Luke Howard

Quakers were drawn primarily towards the observational sciences and away from the more theoretical and mathematical ones. Thus Quakers flocked to astronomy, meteorology and various branches of natural history, especially botany.

Luke Howard was one of the first voices calling for a new Quaker aesthetic. ‘Beauty, then, is in that which is great, in that which is true – in that which God, when he had formed it, pronounced good and blessed it!’  Science was one means of seeking truth and truth in the physical world was manifested through the aesthetic of beauty. Hence every natural phenomenon is duly proportioned and what we see as beautiful speaks of God’s design (Howard 1835).

For Luke Howard the aim of meteorology was to ‘discover a chain of causes and effects, demonstrative like the rest of creation, of the infinite wisdom and goodness of its Author’. Thus in writing of clouds he noted that fair-weather clouds are beautiful, whereas cirrostratus offers ‘a frowning sky’. Again, when contemplating the rainbow he was affected by a ‘double pleasure’ in appreciating that ‘He who formed the world, was pleased, to attach the character of a perpetually recurring sign, that He would no more overwhelm it with the watery element’. Climate of London Vol 1.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe who wrote the poem In honour of Mr. Howard
on reading On the modification of Clouds took a particular joy in meteorology:

Atmospheric phenomena can never become strange
or remote to the poet’s or the painter’s eye.

Sources: Aesthetics in Science, as Practised by Quakers in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, Geoffrey Cantor 1999 University of Leeds