How Artists Have Historically Documented Climate Change

“By the plague wind, every breath of air you draw is polluted,” wrote English art critic John Ruskin in 1884. He described the air pollution caused by industrialization as “the storm cloud—or, more accurately, plague cloud” of the 19th century, prefiguring the rapid development of anthropogenic, or human-caused, climate change. In 2022, almost 140 years after Ruskin delivered this stark assessment, the World Health Organization estimated 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 “Storm Cloud: Picturing the Origins of Our Climate Crisis,” a new exhibition at the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California. With its considerable collections across literary, artistic and natural history—funded by money from the railroads 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 PST Art, a quinquennial initiative organized by the Getty. 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 Melinda McCurdy. The exhibition achieves that goal with a thoughtful and heady combination of nearly 200 scientific and literary publications; artworks; and loans, including ammonites, trilobites and a cast of an ichthyosaurus skull.

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 Kristen Anthony, 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 wrote about the heat-trapping effect of carbon dioxide (a phenomenon now known as the greenhouse effect) in 1856, but she was barred from reading her own groundbreaking paper at a conference, and her contributions were obscured 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 largest single source 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 numerous 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 American West shows an arriving train as a herald of progress, with deer fleeing its oncoming beam. The caption contextualizes the ecosystem destruction wrought by railroads.

“The 19th-century voices in the show are not uniform,” says co-curator Karla Ann Merino Nielsen. 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 period, including geology, glaciology, meteorology and ecology. 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.

McCurdy, Nielsen and Anthony further emphasize the interplay of fields of inquiry through the work of American environmentalists like Henry David Thoreau, whose philosophical escape to nature was published in Walden 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 “picturesque”—ideal, artfully arranged landscapes—and the emotion-provoking “sublime” shaped British art and landscape design. Landscape artists like John Constable grappled with the effects 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 View on the Stour Near Dedham, 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.

As the United States and the United 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 Romantic movement 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 paintings of the ironworks 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 Massachusetts Audubon Society in response to the widespread slaughter 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 beaver fur for hats propelled the U.S. trapping industry until silk plush replaced it in popularity, allowing beaver 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.

Colonialism and climate change

From London’s (pollution-caused) “fog” to Los Angeles’ smog, the show is predominantly Anglo-American 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 largest contributors to global greenhouse gas emissions.

“Climate change as a result of industrialization is tied to colonialism,” says Deborah Coen, 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 Binh Danh, Rebeca Méndez, Jamilah Sabur, Leah Sobsey and Will Wilson 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.

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 Suzanne Pierre 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 website 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 Greta Thunberg, 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

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 wrote 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.

“Storm Cloud: Picturing the Origins of Our Climate Crisis” is on view at the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, through January 6, 2025.