At the height of the Industrial Revolution in February 1884, John Ruskin delivered his lecture series entitled “The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century” before an urbanite audience at the London Institution. The lectures presented, in graphic detail, the increasingly frequent appearances of these “storm-clouds” — known today as smog — in hopes of raising public attention toward the effects of industrial pollution and catalyzing collective action.

Over his career as an astute social and art critic with a polymathic range of talents, Ruskin had cultivated a keen eye for close looking. But for all his perceptiveness, even Ruskin could not have anticipated the full complexity of the environmental developments to come in the following decades. Active in a period when many natural sciences like geology and meteorology were just beginning to modernize, Ruskin and his contemporaries were positioned in a fascinating period — one in which the severity of the climate crisis was only starting to be understood.

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Now at The Huntington, a new exhibition focuses on this special historical locus. Part of the Getty’s “PST ART: Art and Science Collide” initiative, “Storm Cloud: Picturing the Origins of Our Climate Crisis” features the time frame from 1780 through 1930, tracing the evolution of the fossil fuel-powered Industrial Revolution and its range of commentators and critics.

“Storm Cloud” is a tour de force, filling the Marylou and George Boone Gallery with nearly 200 pieces. Drawing in equal measure from the literary, artistic, and scientific collections, the exhibition showcases a broad range of approaches through which individuals were thinking about the environment.

The show is co-curated by Melinda McCurdy, The Huntington’s curator of British art, Karla Nielsen, senior curator of literary collections at The Huntington, and Kristen Anthony, aAssistant cCurator for Special Projects at The Huntington and an environmental expert. Through their wide array of collective expertise, they deliver a highly interdisciplinary exhibition.

“I’ve always said all along, from the beginning of this project — this is not an art show,” McCurdy said. “It is a show about aesthetics, but how they relate to science and observation. And it’s the observation that really is the key, because the observation is in both science and art.”

And indeed, the exhibition does not feel like an art show — in spite of the appearance of familiar painters like John Everett Millais and Frederic Edwin Church. “Storm Cloud” has a more holistic approach, successfully emphasizing the importance of close observation of the environment across different disciplines.

At its most vibrant moments, “Storm Cloud” dissolves disciplinary divisions and allows for meaningful dialogues across its various objects. For instance, the exhibition delightfully counterpoints a long fold-out illustration from William Buckland’s landmark “Geology and Mineralogy Considered with Reference to Natural Theology” with William Dyce’s painting “Pegwell Bay, Kent — A Recollection of October 5th 1858.”

Both objects share a clear interest in observing geological features, albeit with markedly differing techniques: Dyce’s landscape captures the strata visible in the rockface of bay’s cliff with an artistic meticulousness, while Buckland’s cross-section of a mountain into its different rock formations demonstrates an absolute scientific precision.

When brought into concert with each other, Dyce’s oil painting and Buckland’s illustration can reciprocally inform our appreciation of both objects. The Dyce oil painting becomes a vehicle for presenting scientific phenomena, recording visual data that explains the formation of Pegwell Bay’s rock cliff. In turn, the Buckland diagram becomes a beautiful piece of artistry, replete with its own aesthetic flourishes.

“Storm Cloud” brims with these sorts of connections. John Constable’s cloud studies are compared with the works of pioneering meteorologist Luke Howard; Thomas Cole’s autumnal painting “Portage Falls on the Genesee” falls into contact with the autograph manuscript of Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” — composed in geographically similar locations; an edition of H.G. Wells’ “Time Machine” is set in conversation with various timekeeping pieces of the 19th century… to name a few.

Charming though these connections can be, the exhibition is careful to constantly redirect the narrative toward the process of broadening awareness for human effects on the natural world. Through its eclectic collection, “Storm Cloud” illustrates the evolution of the climate crisis to the current moment.

“All the different objects together really help paint a full story — to really understand what this period looked like, and also how the environmental degradation was really amping up throughout the period,” Anthony said.

As a sort of coda, the exhibition features Rebeca Méndez’s 2020 piece “Any-Instant-Whatever,” a two-channel video projection presenting the Los Angeles sky from dawn to dusk. Méndez’s piece draws the exhibition home to Southern California, where sunny blue skies have often been marred by the effects of rampant pollution. Méndez’s observations of the changing sky challenges the viewer to think carefully about our environmental footprint, and encourages us to pursue change — just like Ruskin and many other voices featured in “Storm Cloud.”

“Storm Cloud: Picturing the Origins of Our Climate Crisis” will be on view at The Huntington’s Boone Gallery until Jan. 6, 2025. Students can receive discounted admission with a valid student ID.