The climate warnings in 19th Century paintings

A new exhibition that documents the impact of the Industrial Revolution features several 1800s artists, writers and thinkers as they began to capture the transformation of the environment.

Who knew what, and when, from the start of the 19th Century on, about the impact of industrialisation and the use of fossil fuels on the environment? A new exhibition at the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens, just outside of Los Angeles, entitled Storm Cloud: Picturing the Origins of Our Climate Crisis, helps to trace the scientific, historical and artistic record back to the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution.  

One early witness to the changing hues of the countryside’s once clear skies and untouched landscape was the British-American painter Thomas Cole (1801-1848). In 1839, he travelled to Portage Falls on the Genesee river in upstate New York to document the sublime vistas, rocky cliffs and abundant foliage surrounding the deep gorge through which the river flowed. Cole’s task, commissioned by the New York State Canal Commissioner, was to preserve in oil paint the view about to be destroyed by the forthcoming construction of a new canal that would build on the success of the Erie Canal, which had opened in 1825.  

Cole, who was known for his monumental landscapes, produced a giant-sized vision of nature’s splendour in a canvas that stands 7ft (2.1m) tall and 5ft (1.5m) wide. Vibrant autumnal foliage frames the dramatic vertical view of the gorge and the waterfalls flowing beyond. But this Eden was not pristine. Atop the cliff on one side of the gorge sits a picturesque lodge; just across, on the opposite cliff, on level ground apparently carved out from the wild growth dominating most of the site, lies a housing camp for the canal workers.  

Other omens of industry’s continuing encroachment on nature appear in the form of dark clouds in agitated motion above the gorge. Below the gorge, just beyond an undulating creek, lies the gnarled, twisted remnants of two dead trees. And amidst it all, Cole himself appears as observer and chronicler to the pending loss of the natural landscape in a tiny self-portrait that depicts him sketching the scene while seated in a nearly hidden leafy bower. As if the painting has not sufficiently revealed his sentiments, his words also appear on a gallery wall above: “The ravages of the axe are daily increasing – the most noble scenes are made desolate.” 

Cole’s majestic vision is only one of the approximately 200 items – including paintings, scientific illustrations, rare books, photographs, manuscripts, drawings and textiles – that document how once clear skies and untouched landscapes became transformed by the Industrial Revolution. We see how, from the 1780s on, the engines of industry literally took up steam. Increasing numbers of coal-burning furnaces were soon fuelling more and more factories and mills, with their products often then transported to city markets by newly built railways and re-channelled waterways and canals. 

Among others, French artist Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg (1740-1812) also chronicled the metamorphosis from pastoral scene to industrial workplace. In his 1802 painting, The Ironworks, Coalbrook Dale by Night, the fiery night-time scene of the ore-smelting works appear as frightful as a Halloween cauldron.

Meanwhile, scientists were also observing atmospheric changes and weather deviations, and the exhibition tracks those findings as well. In 1833, British chemist and meteorologist Luke Howard (1772–1864) published his 700-page study, The Climate of London. His examination of a decade’s worth of London’s daily temperature readings, water levels, rainfall and wind direction led him to conclude the existence of what he called an urban “heat island” effect. The accompanying exhibition label explains the process behind Howard’s findings: “Because buildings, roads and other urban infrastructure absorb and re-emit the sun’s heat, cities tend to be several degrees warmer than less developed areas with trees and bodies of water.” Howard also noted that such changes in temperature coincided with a phenomenon he named “city fog” – which today we call smog or air pollution. 

The exhibition also highlights the pioneering environmental work of the lesser-known US scientist, inventor and women’s rights advocate Eunice Newton Foote (1819-1888), whose 1856 publication Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun’s Rays in The American Journal of Science and Arts, demonstrated that carbon dioxide (CO2) trapped heat, a climate-altering process she called the heat-trapping effect. Hers was the first recorded experiment showing the impact of CO2 emissions on what we now call climate change. But Foote’s research was mostly overlooked. Instead, British physicist John Tyndall (1820-1893) received credit for the finding in a study published three years later. It remains unclear whether Tyndall was familiar with Foote’s work. 

Writers like the US author and naturalist Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) had also begun gathering his own measurements of changing river depths and detailed notations of flowering and bird appearances near Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, where he lived. 

But it has only become apparent in recent decades just how essential his observations can serve as comparison points between then and now. Witness on display, for example, Thoreau’s methodical charting of temperatures over the seasons at Walden Pond. More recently, climate change biologist Richard Primack has detailed in his book, Walden Warming, the many flowers that are now blooming earlier today than in Thoreau’s time, due to rising temperatures.  

While Thoreau’s data today is mostly being used for purposes of comparison, the author did himself express alarm at the damage caused by human intervention, says Karla Nielsen, exhibition curator and Huntington’s senior curator of literary collection. On his walks, “He would notice that the Merrimack’s course was being changed due to the factories on the river,” she tells the BBC, because the dams built in connection with the mills disrupted the water’s natural, seasonal flow.

As Melinda McCurdy, The Huntington’s curator of British art and co-curator of the exhibition tells the BBC: “We’re not saying that climate change was recognised as such in the 19th Century,” But at the same time, she says, people were beginning to: “recognise that the Industrial Revolution and human actions” were changing the environment.

Perhaps ironically, these growing inklings of the potential damage being caused by industrialisation coincided with an increasing reverence for nature, fostered by Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth, some of whose early editions are also on display. Or perhaps this newfound enthusiasm was fed at least in part by the growth of cities, where many former rural inhabitants now lived, finding work in the burgeoning realms of industry. Guidebooks (several of which are on display in the exhibition) proliferated as travellers ventured into the countryside to reconnect with nature.  

Such attitudes fostered the environmental awareness of Thomas Cole, among others. But it may have also influenced some artists to not explicitly show the changes taking place in the environment. The British artist James Ward (1769–1859) in 1805, for instance, matter-of-factly portrayed the landscape of the leading industrial area near Swansea, south Wales, popularly called Copperopolis, as if the dark clouds of smoke arising from the factory chimneys had always been there. 

In a somewhat similar vein, some critics now argue that the paintings of the great British artist John Constable (1776-1837) present often idealised views of the Sussex countryside with which his work is so closely identified. These are the lands through which the Stour River ran, where he had grown up and to which he remained attached throughout his life. On display we see one of his famous 6ft-long landscapes (often called his six-footers), View on the Stour Near Dedham, 1822. It is an inviting pastoral scene in which riverbank greenery frames men at work steering their barges through the water – and also directs viewers’ eyes to a wooden bridge in the distance and beyond that, the church tower of the town of Dedham. 

Certainly, the painting shows off Constable’s remarkable eye for detail; his many hours of observation spent sketching clouds had taught him to render cloud formations with scientific exactitude. But the realistically rendered scene does not tell the entire story, says McCurdy. Over the course of Constable’s adulthood, British landscapes may have been in the process of being criss-crossed and torn up by railroads and factories, and rivers were being turned into easily navigable canals. But the scene that he presents, McCurdy says, is one “viewed through the nostalgic lens of childhood… while painting it as an adult”.  

In stark contrast, the British artist and critic John Ruskin (1819-1900) decried the coal-generated soot and smoke darkening the formerly clear skies as “The Storm Cloud of the 19th Century”. That was the title he used for two public lectures he gave in 1884, and his words resound throughout the exhibition, which prominently displays his exhortation describing the storm cloud as looking as if “it were made of dead men’s souls”.   

The exhibition shows slide projections derived from drawings by Ruskin which he used in his lectures, Thunderclouds, Val d’Aosta (1858) and Cloud Study: Ice Clouds over Coniston (1880), as well as an 1876 watercolour titled Sunset at Herne Hill through the Smoke of London. In these works, viewers can see the darkening transformation of the skies that Ruskin had meticulously traced in his diaries and drawings through the years. What we now know as air pollution he called a “plague-wind”. Ruskin had hoped to stoke concern with his lectures, which were among the earliest works to explicitly discuss human-made climate change, but it’s unclear what difference his outrage made. “I don’t know of any specific reports of reactions to the lectures,” McCurdy says.  

Still, London’s pea-soup thick, discoloured air was by then no secret, with writers such as Charles Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle frequently alluding to the city’s unhealthy and visibility-limiting yellowish fog, as did numerous cartoons in Punch. And in 1891, British scientist BH Thwaite (1858-1908) published a cautionary pamphlet titled The London Smoke Plague. In it, he contended that London’s coal-induced poor air quality was as deadly as the 17th-Century Great Plague, accounting for the mortality of four per cent of London’s population over two weeks in 1886. 

By the start of the 20th Century, various groups advocating cleaner air had begun forming. Indeed, British artist RW Nevinson (1889–1946), whose 1916 hazily greyish pastel, From an Office Window, appears in the exhibition, himself helped found The Brighter London Society.   

But the storm cloud of the 19th Century didn’t cease, which is why the exhibition’s most powerful and poignant work may well be the imposing icescape Glacier of Rosenlaui by the Ruskin-influenced British artist John Brett (1831-1902). A broad, bright stream of white tinged with blue emerges, and travels upward from a bed of boulders and stones of varying sizes, ultimately leading to a heaven-like mist of mountains and clouds, and perhaps beyond time itself as it reaches the painting’s top. What better symbol of natural splendour than this pristine glacier, so thickly ensconced by layers of snow and ice, that it’s almost impossible to imagine this frozen mass retreating, melting, dissolving as temperatures rise. 

Storm Cloud: Picturing the Origins of Our Climate Crisis is at the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, until 6 January 2025.