The 19th century landscape paintings hanging in London’s Tate Britain museum looked awfully familiar to climate physicist Anna Lea Albright. Artist Joseph Mallord William Turner’s signature way of shrouding his vistas in fog and smoke reminded Albright of her own research tracking air pollution.
“I started wondering if there was a connection,” says Albright, who had been visiting the museum on a day off from the Laboratory for Dynamical Meteorology in Paris. After all, Turner — a forerunner of the impressionist movement — was painting as Britain’s industrial revolution gathered steam, and a growing number of belching manufacturing plants earned London the nickname “The Big Smoke.”
Turner’s early works, such as his 1814 painting “Apullia in Search of Appullus,” were rendered in sharp details. Later works, like his celebrated 1844 painting “Rain, Steam and Speed — the Great Western Railway,” embraced a dreamier, fuzzier aesthetic.
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Perhaps, Albright thought, this burgeoning painting style wasn’t a purely artistic phenomenon. Perhaps Turner and his successors painted exactly what they saw: their environs becoming more and more obscured by smokestack haze.
To find out how much realism there is in impressionism, Albright teamed up with Harvard University climatologist Peter Huybers, who’s an expert in reconstructing pollution before instruments existed to closely track air quality. Their analysis of nearly 130 paintings by Turner, Paris-based impressionist Claude Monet and several others tells a tale of two modernizing cities.
Low contrast and whiter hues are hallmarks of the impressionist style. They are also hallmarks of air pollution, which can affect how a distant…
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