How Artists, Writers and Scientists of the Past Documented Climate Change

[Pelican Press 0]

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

How Artists, Writers and Scientists of the Past Documented Climate Change

data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///ywAAAAAAQABAAACAUwAOw==

Anne Wallentine

History Correspondent

“By the plague wind, every breath of air you draw is polluted,”

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

English art critic John Ruskin in 1884. He described the air pollution caused by industrialization as “the

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

—or, more accurately, plague cloud” of the 19th century, prefiguring the rapid development of anthropogenic, or human-caused,

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

. In 2022, almost 140 years after Ruskin delivered this stark assessment, the World Health Organization

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

that 99 percent of the world’s population breathes polluted air linked to the dangerous emissions created by fossil fuels like coal and oil.

Foreboding phrases from Ruskin’s lecture and other prescient observations about industrialization’s effect on the environment float on the walls of “

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

,” a new exhibition at the

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

in San Marino, California. With its considerable collections across literary, artistic and natural history—funded by

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

that fueled Western expansion—the Huntington is well placed to examine how Europeans and Americans witnessed and documented the climate crisis taking shape between 1780 and 1930.

“Storm Cloud” is part of

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

, a quinquennial initiative organized by

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

. The Huntington’s curatorial staff aimed to use their institution’s art and book collections to reveal the historic roots of the climate crisis and show “the inextricable interconnectedness of the arts and sciences,” says co-curator

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

. The exhibition achieves that goal with a thoughtful and heady combination of

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

scientific and literary publications; artworks; and loans, including ammonites, trilobites and a cast of an ichthyosaurus skull.

data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///ywAAAAAAQABAAACAUwAOw==

An illustration from Thomas Forster’s 1815 book Researches About Atmospheric Phenomena, engraved by Frederick ********** Lewis

The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens

Historical understandings of climate change

Many people “think that we came to understand that full picture [of the climate crisis] within the last 20 to 30 years,” says co-curator

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

, noting that for many visitors to the exhibition, “what’s really surprising … is that there was an understanding of human impact on the environment much, much earlier than most people understand today.” Scientist Eunice Newton Foote

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

the heat-trapping effect of carbon dioxide (a phenomenon now known as the

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

) in 1856, but she was barred from reading her own

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

at a conference, and her contributions

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

by those made several years later by a male physicist named John Tyndall.

Foote’s article is included in the exhibition alongside publications warning about the use of coal—now the

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

of global temperature rise—and oil. They throw into sharp relief the lithographs on the nearby wall that advertise the belching smokestacks of factories as positive signs of industrial progress. Given that the Huntington’s collections include

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

railroad artifacts, it’s interesting that the exhibition includes only a few pieces of train-related ephemera. An 1867 painting lent by the Autry Museum of the ********* West shows an arriving train

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

, with deer fleeing its oncoming beam. The caption contextualizes the ecosystem destruction wrought by railroads.

data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///ywAAAAAAQABAAACAUwAOw==

Cloud Study: Ice Clouds Over Coniston, Arthur Severn after John Ruskin, 1884

© The Ruskin, Lancaster University

“The 19th-century voices in the show are not uniform,” says co-curator

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

. Some were “complaints against industry, or they’re laments for the impacts on the natural world.” Others “celebrate industry [and] were very optimistic about technology.” Overall, Nielsen adds, “We wanted to show that there have always been many responses, but also that the voices of caution have been overridden for a very long time.”

The relationship between art and science

“Storm Cloud” takes a case study approach that allows visitors to understand the historic views and development of several fields of science that emerged in this *******, including

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

,

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

,

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

and

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

. In each section, the exhibition also emphasizes the long-overlooked contributions of women to science (and art), showcasing the work of scientific illustrator Orra White Hitchcock and fossil collector and proto-paleontologist Mary Anning, among others.

The show continually underscores how much art has historically been part of science, especially before modern, mechanical techniques of reproduction, when observations had to be recorded by hand. The section on geologic time explores how educators like Hitchcock described estimations of the earth’s age by delineating geologic strata in long, colorful maps, as well as painstakingly drawing assemblages of fossils to understand and disseminate the human discoveries of ancient life.

data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///ywAAAAAAQABAAACAUwAOw==

A mid-18th-century botanical sketch by Mary Parker, Countess of Macclesfield

The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens

data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///ywAAAAAAQABAAACAUwAOw==

Portage Falls on the Genesee, Thomas Cole, circa 1839

Gift of the Ahmanson Foundation / The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens

McCurdy, Nielsen and Anthony further emphasize the interplay of fields of inquiry through the work of ********* environmentalists like

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

, whose philosophical escape to nature was published in

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

in 1854. Thoreau worked as a surveyor after the book’s publication, and his surveying map of the Concord River, displayed alongside his walking stick and the Walden manuscript, shows that his observations of nature were practical as well as poetic.

Industrialization and the natural world

In the late 18th century, the concepts of the “

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

”—ideal, artfully arranged landscapes—and the emotion-provoking “

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

” shaped British art and landscape design. Landscape artists like John Constable

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

of industrialization in their works and created aesthetic responses to emerging data about climate—a theme explored in Constable’s studies of clouds in one of the exhibition’s galleries.

Constable’s 1822

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

, which is also included in the exhibition, depicts a seemingly rural scene. But it contains hints of the industrial infrastructure of the river, which had already been canalized for commodity transport.

data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///ywAAAAAAQABAAACAUwAOw==

Iron Works of Coalbrookdale in The Romantic and Picturesque Scenery of England and Wales, Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg, 1805

The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens

As the ******* States and the ******* Kingdom shifted rapidly from rural, agrarian societies to urban and industrial economies during the 19th century, the transformation played out in paintings and literature that romanticized and idealized nature for the newly urbanized classes. This

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

inspired many to appreciate and tour natural landscapes—made more accessible through industrial travel—and led to eventual conservation efforts. The industrial world, in effect, helped to define and make this new, idyllic version of the natural world available to the affluent and middle classes. It was even romanticized itself in sublime, dramatic compositions like Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg’s

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

at Coalbrookdale, England.

Other artists, writers and intellectuals sought to counter the industrial status quo. A section of the exhibition on the relationship between humans and animals explains how two women activists founded the

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

in response to the widespread ********** of birds for fashion accessories. One of the hats in question from the early 1900s is on display, featuring the entire body of a ring-necked pheasant swooping across a cap, its tail feathers drooping behind. The use of

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

propelled the U.S. trapping industry until silk plush replaced it in popularity, allowing ******* populations to recover. These stories of the devastating human impact on ecosystems equally illustrate how attitudes can change, and have changed, through activism that shifts cultural norms.

data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///ywAAAAAAQABAAACAUwAOw==

View of the “Storm Cloud: Picturing the Origins of Our Climate Crisis” exhibition

Elon Schoenholz / The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens

Colonialism and climate change

From London’s (

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

-caused) “fog” to Los Angeles’

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

, the show is predominantly Anglo-********* in its focus, with a brief foray into colonial exploitation in the Caribbean. This scope is based on the focus of the Huntington’s collections, as well as the causes of industrial pollution: Historically, the U.S. and Europe have been two of the

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

to global greenhouse gas emissions.

“Climate change as a result of industrialization is tied to colonialism,” says

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

, a historian at Yale University who was not involved in the exhibition. More broadly, she adds, “Science is tied to colonialism and industrialization. The very knowledge comes out of those historical forces.”

In “Storm Cloud,” contemporary works by

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

,

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

,

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

,

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

and

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

are intermingled with the historic material to broaden the show’s lens and include responses to colonial domination and its extractive views of the environment. “We chose artists that were also able to bring the conversation to the present … to highlight more diverse voices, and also to think about some of the impacts of environmental injustice, like who is living through some of the worst of the impact, or whose lands have been most vulnerable to extraction policies,” Nielsen says.

data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///ywAAAAAAQABAAACAUwAOw==

Vale of St. Thomas, Jamaica, Frederic Edwin *******, 1867

Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut . The Elizabeth Hart Jarvis Colt Collection / Image courtesy of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art

But it’s the written responses from contemporary scientists, artists and tribal leaders that accompany selected works that perhaps leave the most powerful impression: As ecologist

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

asks, “To the colonizing mind, is every new paradise also an accountant’s ledger?”

Contemporary reflections on the climate crisis

A QR code posted in the exhibition takes visitors to a

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

charting carbon dioxide levels between 1000 and the present. The graph shows a gentle, bumping slope until the 1840s, at which point the line starts to climb before turning into a steep, alarming spike. This data, alongside the listing of historic carbon dioxide levels at the time works were made on each gallery label, reminds viewers of the urgency of the exhibition’s theme. According to Anthony, its inclusion was inspired by young climate activists like

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

, who share the carbon dioxide level in the year they were born rather than a birthdate, “to show just how rapidly CO2 is rising in someone’s short lifetime [and to] create more climate fluency, so that people are more and more familiar with those numbers.”

Rebeca Méndez on Storm Cloud, John Ruskin, and a Perfect Sky

data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///ywAAAAAAQABAAACAUwAOw==

The exhibition’s interweaving of the artistic, literary and scientific portrayals of nature and industrialization reveals not only the essential interconnectedness of science and art in the 19th century but also how these depictions have influenced our present-day ecological understanding. “We know that the climate crisis has become politicized,” McCurdy says. “What we’re trying to do is historicize it.”

In 2019, essayist Brian Dillon

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

that Ruskin’s storm cloud lectures “tore open the pavilion of Victorian self-possession and pointed furiously at a sky from which all the nightmares would soon come.” This exhibition does much the same, pointing at key artifacts from the past to illuminate the present.

“

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

” is on view at the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, through January 6, 2025.

Get the latest History stories in your inbox?

Filed Under:

********* History,

Art,

Art History,

Art Meets Science,

Artists,

British History,

Climate Change,

Contemporary Art,

evolving climate,

Exhibitions,

Exhibits,

Industrial Revolution,

Painters,

Painting,

Women in Science,

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

#Artists #Writers #Scientists #Documented #Climate #Change

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up