André des Gachons: Weather Warning

– Mehdi Zannad

The recent publication, La Veille du ciel: aquarelles météorologiques (Phénomène éditions), one of the most beautiful books published in 2025, gathers together forty years of daily weather reports by André des Gachons on the skies above the small rural commune of La Chaussée-sur-Marne, in eastern France. Des Gachons remained subjective despite the pragmatism of the local mission that entrusted him with the Central Meteorological Bureau in 1913. This entomologist of the ether pinned tens of thousands of vignettes where the wonder of a celestial spectacle crowns the treetops and farm buildings. The sketches made on site were then reworked in his studio—a weather station too—with the delicate touch of the illuminations that monks applied to vellum. A unique system of framed index cards holds miniatures from various points in the village, or from a small observatory perched on the wall of his property.

He believed he had grasped the formula for the elusive laws of meteorology, but his efforts were thwarted a few months after he began by the evolution of the discipline from 1914 onward: the acceleration of discoveries benefiting aircraft, observation balloons, and the dispersal of poison gas—the work covers three years spent 30 kilometres from the front, where the plumes of shells sometimes crossed his field of vision.

Over the next three decades, his reports evolved into a form of raw art. The frames are drawn by hand, and the margins are covered with coded symbols, with no other purpose than to pursue a score, a symphony of a life devoted to drawing. In the atmospheric and serial music of his watercolours, the sky lifts its lid, soothing the dramas unfolding below.

Mehdi Zannad is an architect and a lecturer at the Paris-Malaquais School of Architecture. He regularly exhibits his drawings and also works as an illustrator for various architectural firms. His work was incorporated into the FRAC PACA collections in 2016.

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From the Drawing Matter Collection

Plates from Atlas International des Nuages (International Cloud Atlas) published in 1896 by the Comité Météorologique International. See more on DMC.