Storm Cloud: Picturing the Origins of our Climate Crisis

The Huntington, San Merino, CA: September 14, 2024-January 6, 2025

This richly substantive exhibit, Storm Cloud: Picturing the Origins of our Climate Crisis, is part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time initiative, Art and Science Collide.[1] Drawing on the observations of critic, artist, and thinker John Ruskin (1819-1900) as a point of departure, Storm Cloud examines changes in atmospheric phenomena that were already indicating the effects of human activity on the environment in the 19^th century. Some of the PST exhibits were a little light on science, but Storm Cloud dug into intellectual shifts in knowledge production and representation that integrated scientific techniques and visual observation in the period.[2] Part of the subtext of Storm Cloud is the way the records of atmospheric transformations were registering in artists’ observations at the same time as individuals engaged in the natural sciences were developing new empirical methods of assessment and conventions for visualizing that information. The links made to broader cultural activities extend these insights to the underpinnings of daily life.

Arthur Severn, after John Ruskin, Ice Clouds over Coniston, 1884. Copyright The Ruskin, Lancaster University.

As the curators point out, Ruskin had given a lecture in 1884, “The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century,” in which he made detailed descriptions of an atmospheric phenomena that had recently made its appearance.[3] He called the dark, muddy clouds that constituted this phenomena “plague-clouds” on account of their effect on light as well as on organisms (leaves withered, trees died in the dark mist). Ruskin was a prominent figure in 19^th-century Britain, and beyond, for his critical writings on art, education, politics, and natural sciences. An early supporter of J.M.W. (Joseph Mallord William) Turner’s sublimely atmospheric paintings, Ruskin was keenly engaged with the observation of the natural world, and highly critical of modern mechanical methods of production various domains. He became an inspiration for the Pre-Raphaelite movement whose turn towards medieval models echoed beliefs he had articulated in The Stones of Venice: The Nature of Gothic (1851-53). His thinking also exerted considerable influence on William Morris’s formulation of the principles of the Arts and Crafts movement in its attempt to revive pre-industrial methods of production. But Ruskin was also an artist whose sketchbooks are filled with studies of waterfalls and foliage as well as cloud formations, evidence of his commitment to observation.

The choice of Ruskin, an artist, aesthetician, philosopher, rather than any of a number of other figures (painters, scientists, poets) as the figure on whom to open the exhibit vividly emphasizes the public nature of discourse around climate change in the 19^th century. Ruskin was a high profile figure, not one restricted to a single discipline or practice. A magic lantern of the kind Ruskin might have used to lecture is on display in the entry gallery of the exhibit reinforcing that public aspect of his profile. Projections of his cloud studies, paintings on glass, combine delicate luminescence with carefully observed detail. The presence of these elements of nineteenth century technology immediately sets the mood, for the polished brass, candle tower, and lens of the magic lantern situate the exhibit within a period both remote from and connected to our own. 19^th century industrialization provided the foundation for the transforming effects of extraction industries and mass production at an unprecedented scale that have led directly to current climate change.

Ruskin’s watercolor studies of clouds provide the segue to the galleries that follow where cloud studies are present in abundance, in the form of spontaneous sketches in the field and reworked into canvases. A pamphlet by B.H. Thwaite, ominously titled The London Smoke Plague (1891) identifies the coal-induced threat to life, citing statistical evidence of deaths linked to poor air quality at the same time as popular advertisements for factories and power sources used smokestacks as iconic motifs. The clear message that industrialization was transforming the air comes through in the heavy palette and darkening tones. Even the painter of idyllic pastoral scenes, such as John Constable, John Everett Millais, or James Ward, register the presence of new structures in the landscape and their potential influence. These are not artists foretelling a future shift, but skilled observers registering change in the present. Not only visual artists, but poets—William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson–record their observations on nature, humanity, and the age of the earth. And, of course, many writers struggled to reconcile Biblical accounts of Creation with the evidence of new findings, with the multi-volume Bridgewater Treatises on the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God, as Manifested in the Creation as one striking example that would fit all too well into our current debates.

Among the major breakthroughs influencing 19^th century sensibility came when the Scottish geologist James Hutton noticed, studied, and wrote about a feature of the earth which he termed an “unconformity”—a place where two different geological formations reveal different processes and origins in ways that cannot be reconciled to a single act of “Creation” at one moment in time. Hutton’s wonderfully titled publication, Concerning the System of the Earth, its Duration and Stability, published in the late 1780s, permanently transformed the understanding of time from a biblical to a geological scale. Hutton was a powerful influence on Charles Lyell, a collaborator with Charles Darwin on Principles of Geology, published in the 1830s, which asserted that processes of change in the earth were ongoing. The idea of dynamism in natural systems was obvious in observations of the atmosphere. Transferring these to geological formations required a leap in scale—and posed a challenge to faith.

The development of visual conventions to depict geological time scales codified the challenge to biblical history as did the establishment of a standard nomenclature for geological periods. One of the more striking objects in the geological area of the exhibit was a hand-drawn time chart created for a schoolroom by Orra White Hitchcock. With the realization that to a great extent the age of fossils and other objects could be correlated to their distance from the surface of the earth, the concept of stratification developed rapidly. Many of the period names were based on locations where early research took place, much of which was in the British Isles. Cambria was the Latinized version of Cymru (Wales), Ordovician derived from the name of Welsh tribe, Orodovices, and Silurian after another Welsh tribe, Devonian for Devon in England and so on, even though Hadean (named after the god of the underworld) and Archaean (meaning old or ancient) were merely descriptive of conditions and age early in the Earth’s formation. The point is that these intellectual frameworks were emerging rapidly in the 19^th century, and that visual, verbal, and material forms of knowledge were integrated in their development. The magnificent plates from William Buckland’s Geology and Minerology Considered with Reference to Natural Theology, 1837, contain much information about the subterranean networks of lava, magma, and formations that resulted in igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic rock types. How this underground geological plumbing was mapped is a whole investigation unto itself, but above ground, Buckland presented specimens of animals grouped by type and arranged by size as a complement to the geological analysis.

Among other wonders, an anonymous portrait of the pioneering paleontologist, Mary Anning, shown with her dog, Tray and fossils and rock samples (including some from Ruskin’s collection) populate the galleries. The fact that we see primary objects, pedagogical tools, scientific publications, and artistic expression all in the same space demonstrates the scale of the cultural shift that was not siloed within specific disciplines, but engaged across many sectors of the population. Dramatic fossil remains, drawings that were attempting to imagine the full forms of vanished animals based on fragments, and other objects are vivid testimonials to the imaginative engagement prompted by new discoveries.

The interaction of natural landscapes and human patterns of use shows in nearly every canvas, drawing or print. A colored aquatint, Iron Works of Coalbrook Dale, by the French-British artist Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg shows the burning stacks as a modern inferno. Tellingly, the image was printed in 1805 in The Romantic and Picturesque Scenery of England and Wales. The fascination exerted on European and British painters as they encountered the grandeur of the Americas also registers their engagement with the study of atmospheric phenomena—and the exhibit deftly segues to images of colonial expansion, exploitation, and degradation of human beings and landscapes in the effort to feed industrial manufacture and consumption abroad. Abolitionist protests at enslavement of native peoples, though small in proportion to the practice, registered in the iconography of labels and brands that promoted the fact that they had been produced without the use of slave labor.

Among the many treasures from the Huntington’s own rich resources and the borrowed objects that complement them are objects of such iconic stature that they inspire immediate awe, at least in this visitor. The manuscript of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1848-54) was in a case next to his walking stick and a map on which he recorded measurements of water in the Concord River. These artifacts have incomparable value, but they also demonstrate direct involvement in thoughtful reflection on natural systems.

In the final galleries, the relation between consumption and production, extraction and manufacturing was made vividly clear in the display of 19^th-century advertisements for clothing, up-to-date fashion, the stuff in which the environmental costs are concealed. Who thinks about cotton clothing in relation to the life-cycle of its production? Or a beaver hat, the fashion for which was swapped for silk “toppers” as the animals were threatened with extinction? The implications of these images are clear if we transfer them to present day activities. We are all involved in and dependent on the industries that impact the climate, and only marginally more aware of this than 19^th century populations.

At the end of the exhibit, photographs of California’s oil fields brought home the way the vast drilling and extraction created wealth and power here while wreaking havoc on indigenous populations and previously unpolluted landscapes. Perhaps one of the most chilling images in the exhibit is from the film footage that shows William Mulholland, in company of others, arriving by car to the opening of the newly constructed channels of the LA Aqueduct in 1913. The landscape around them is empty, apparently uninhabited, and the enormous infrastructure imposed to control and channel water into Los Angeles and other regions merely seems to be routing an infinite and inexhaustible resource to serve new populations and purposes. A century later we are grappling with the long-term effects of this action.

Ruskin’s original 1884 lectures were filled with concern.[4] He perceived that the natural beauty for which he had profound admiration was threatened by development. His grim recognition that the state of the world was being affected by conditions that had not existed previously was supported by elaborate descriptions of clouds. But one of the striking features of his texts is the poetic richness of his composition and the erudition of his reference base. Ruskin draws on classical references, Romantic poetry, and a long history of literary texts in sentences rife with vivid vocabulary as he inventories colors in the sky: “[…] I would have you ask me, why argent and why sable, how baptized in white like a bride or a novice, and how hooded with blackness like a Judge of the Vehmgericht Tribunal […]” (11)

But his most damning language is kept for the destructive forces of pollution:

“This wind is the plague-wind of the eighth decade of years in the nineteenth century; a period which will assuredly be recognized in future meteorological history as one of phenomena hitherto unrecorded in the courses of nature, and characterized pre-eminently by the almost ceaseless action of this calamitous wind.” (p. 21)

He goes on, citing his an earlier text from 1871:

"It looks partly as if it were made of poisonous smoke; very possibly it may be: there are at least two hundred furnace chimneys in a square of two miles on every side of me. But mere smoke would not blow to and fro in that wild way. It looks more to me as if it were made of dead men's souls—such of them as are not gone yet where they have to go, and may be flitting hither and thither, doubting, themselves, of the fittest place for them.” (p. 22 ) The words “malignant” and “ruinous” along with “venomous” appear as does the description of the “filthiness of lurid, yet not sublimely lurid, smoke-cloud; dense manufacturing mist; fearful squalls of shivery wind” (26). The language is vivid, the emotions intense, implications horrifying.

His first lecture was followed by a second which he opens with a description of the “vapor over the pool of Anger in the ‘Inferno,’ the clogging stench” and so on. But he is hardly limited to an antiquarian sensibility by this, instead bringing his references into the present: “I shall have occasion to take notice of the effect of this character of plague-cloud on our younger painters, who have perhaps never in their lives seen a clean sky!” (40) Ruskin not only cites poets and literary figures, but also scientists, such as Gilbert White, who wrote in a 1793 letter on the “Natural History of Selborne”: 'The summer of the year 1783 was an amazing and portentous one, and full of horrible phenomena; for besides the alarming meteors and tremendous thunderstorms that affrighted and distressed the different counties of this kingdom, the peculiar haze or smoky fog that prevailed for many weeks in this island and in every part of Europe, and even beyond its limits, was a most extraordinary appearance, unlike anything known within the memory of man.”

Nearly every image and artifact in this exhibit could sustain a discussion about the complex systems of production, consumption, extraction, pollution, and observation involved. Storm Cloud shows that science and art did not collide, they collaborated as two complementary modes of knowledge intuiting directions that would have many implications for the future. Now that past seems prescient, though at the time it was rooted in attention to and observation of the changing but present world.

CODA: Though not the focus of this exhibit, a complementary study of the development of meteorology and its transformation as a field in the 19^th century would be fascinating. While observation of the volatile cycles of the atmosphere had been practiced since antiquity, significant advances occurred in measurements and instruments gained momentum in the 17^th century work of, among others, Edmund Halley who produced a remarkable global map of the trade winds.[5] Earlier in the century, Galileo, or a contemporary of his, is credited with building the first “thermoscope” or device for measuring temperature—but no standard scales existed until the 18^th century when Anders Celsius and Daniel Fahrenheit made their individual contributions.[6] The impact of such conceptual innovations is almost impossible to assess and required increasingly sophisticated mathematics to model the fluid dynamics of the atmosphere. The rapid transformations in empirical science were accompanied by radical changes in the infrastructure of knowledge production. The near-simultaneous communication of data by telegraph, for instance, made it possible to track patterns in temperature and pressure changes across time and geography in ways that were unprecedented. Standards for record-keeping and conventions for visualization (such as the use of isobars in weather maps) made it possible to capture the ephemeral phenomena of weather for longer-term study. Clearly this passion of mine was not the subject of Storm Cloud, so this coda is not a criticism, rather, a recognition of the inexhaustible potential for research along the lines of the exhibit and the kernel of a long-cherished idea for a project ahead.

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[1] Storm Cloud, 2024. https://huntington.org/exhibition/storm-cloud-picturing-origins-our-climate-crisis

[2] Another exception was the magnificent Lumen exhibit at the Getty Museum, now dismantled, which presented a fascinating array of medieval astronomy and optics along with magnificently luminous artifacts.

[3] John Ruskin, “The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century,” Two cectures delivered at the London Institution, February 4th and February 11^th, 1884. The Complete Works of John Ruskin, Volume XXIV. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/20204/pg20204-images.html

[4] Ibid.

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_meteorology

[6] Ibid. Details throughout this coda make use of the Timeline.