“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 interconnectednes.