Ruskin's Deep Time at the Huntington

John Brett, Glacier of Rosenlaui, 1856. Tate, London

The Huntington's "Storm Cloud: Picturing the Origins of Our Climate Crisis" starts with an audacious premise: that Victorian art critic John Ruskin was an unheeded prophet of climate change. The exhibition delivers on that bit of revisionist history surprisingly well. Of the major PST ART shows, it offers one of the most sustained dialogs between art and science. Add in literature, economics, and a bit of pop culture as well. With over 200 objects, the Huntington show rethinks the histories of science, colonialism, the plantation economy, capitalism, and real estate development while offering original glosses on Constable's cloud studies, Romantic poetry, the Pre-Raphaelites, the Hudson River School, Henry David Thoreau, Carleton Watkins, Upton Sinclair, and more. 

John Constable's View on the Stour Near Dedham, 1822. The Huntington

John Constable's "six-footers" already recognized that his beloved Stour had become a conduit of global supply chains. Thomas Cole's Portage Falls on the Genesee (1839) protests the industrialization of upstate New York's wilderness. Autumn glory coexists with portents of doom: a storm cloud and a blasted tree.

Thomas Cole's Portage Falls on the Genesee, 1839. The Huntington

Cloud studies by John Constable (middle row) and Luke Howard (top and bottom) 

Magic lantern (with descriptions of polluted air by Ruskin)

The show's title derives from Ruskin's 1884 magic-lantern lecture series, "The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century." He argued that the industrial revolution was changing the climate, and not for the better. Though Ruskin's concern was more aesthetic than existential, he was among the first to articulate the concept of air pollution. In his drawings he recorded the retreat of glaciers in the Alps. He collected mineral specimens as well as art.

Specimens from John Ruskin's rock collection. The Brentwood Trust

John Everett Millais, The Waterfall, 1853. Delaware Art Museum

Ruskin insisted on geological authenticity in his criticism. John Everett Millais depicted both Ruskin and wife Effie against the craggy, metamorphic splendor of Glenfinlas, Scotland. A small portrait of Effie is in the show. She soon had her unconsummated marriage to Ruskin annulled, and she married Millais in the great scandal of the Pre-Raphaelite circle.

The backdrop for Ruskin's failed marriage was another estrangement, that of "deep time." Nineteenth century geologists established that the Earth was (at least) hundreds of times older than the Bible allowed. Ruskin wrote that his faith "is being beaten into mere gold leaf… If only the Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses."

Unknown artist, Portrait of Mary Anning and Her Dog, Tray, before 1842. Natural History Museum, London 

Deep time entailed the realization that the Earth, its species, and its climate had changed over the eons. Living on England's Jurassic Coast—which gave its name to the dinosaur-positive period—pioneering paleontologist Mary Anning discovered fossils of ichthyosaurs, toothy sea creatures unlike any living today. 

William Dyce, Pegwell Bay, Kent—A Recollection of October 5th 1858 (1858-60?). Tate, London

William Dyce's Pegwell Bay, Kent—A Recollection of October 5th 1858 is an ambivalent synthesis of Anning's new reality. Seaside tourists search for fossils before chalk cliffs rendered in Ruskinian detail. At top center is Donati's comet. Astronomy was likewise confirming deep time. Dyce's painting is contemporary with the publication of Darwin's The Origin of Species (1859).

Henry Thomas De la Beche, Ichthyosaurs Attending a Lecture on Fossilized Human Remains, or Awful Changes, 1830. Welcome Collection, London

Henry Thomas De la Beche was a geologist, paleontologist, and heir to Jamaican slave-owner wealth. His side gig was cartoons. Here he imagines future Ichthyosaurs speculating on extinct humanity. "Storm Cloud" has a Jamaican sidebar with plantation drawings by a relative of "Pinkie" and Frederic Church's Vale of St. Thomas, Jamaica.

Frederic Edwin Church, Vale of St. Thomas, Jamaica, 1867, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Conn. 

Henry David Thoreau, manuscript for Walden; or, Life in the Woods, 1848-54. The Huntington 

Carleton Watkins, Photographic Views of Kern County, California, "Late George Cling Peaches," 1881-89. The Huntington

Carleton Watkins, "Late George Cling Peaches," 1881-89. Image by Tyler Green

Carleton Watkins' celebrated Late George Cling Peaches was commissioned as an exhibit for a lawsuit over California water rights. The Huntington's print is part of its original album. Seen in the flesh, it is a mammoth-plate marvel of trompe l'oeil, Pop before the fact, and truth to materials.

Walter Crane, Alternate Design for "The Capitalist," about 1888. The Huntington

The Academy Museum has Cyberpunk Sci-Fi, while "Storm Cloud" bows towards the Steampunk ancestors. There's a fascinating array of Victorian science fiction, starting with H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, a study in deep time anxiety. Writers you've never heard of were contemplating climate dystopias before the movies existed.

C. R. W. Nevinson, From an Office Window, 1916. The Huntington

British Futurist C. R. W. Nevinson minted modernism out of London fog. His pastel here was acquired by the Huntington in 2022. The artist went on to co-found the Brighter London Society, promoting clean air. It wasn't until 1938 however that British engineer Guy Stewart Callendar showed that carbon dioxide was warming the climate. The enemy is invisible.

Of the show's few contemporary pieces, Rebeca Ménde's video cloud study of the L.A. sky is a worthy coda. "Storm Cloud" is in the Boone Gallery through Jan. 6, 2025.

Rebeca Ménde, Any-Instant-Whatever, 2020 (sound by Drew Schnurr)