The Skies are for All: Ruskin and Climate Change

22 April 2022 – 26 June 2022

Blue Gallery, Brantwood – John Ruskin in the Age of Science (3)

Exhibition Leaflet: ‘The Skies are for All: Ruskin and Climate Change’

Exhibition Blog: ‘Cloud Perspectives’

A lifetime of observing the skies led John Ruskin to conclude that human activities were damaging the environment. In 1884, his lecture ‘The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century’ described a veil of pollution that was darkening the skies over Europe. This first exhibition in the series ‘John Ruskin in the Age of Science’ explored Ruskin and Climate Change.

As with the painters John Constable and Turner before him, Ruskin was familiar with the classification of cloud types by Luke Howard into cirrus, cumulus (or nimbus), and stratus. This system, further developed into ‘more minute distinctions’ by Robert FitzRoy, proposed a scientific structure to what had been seen as an elusive natural phenomena.

Ruskin’s first passion was geology. He claimed that his art was rooted in his ‘love of mountains and sea’. He was one of the most prolific private mineral collectors of the nineteenth century. With a personal collection of over 2,000 specimens, he donated minerals to schools and colleges across the country. Having studied mountain formation and glaciers, he returned again and again to Chamonix, below the slopes of Mont Blanc. His concern with the impact of climate on glacial erosion is a leitmotif in his work. In 1874 he wrote of the Glacier des Bossons: ‘I was able to cross the dry bed of a glacier, which I had seen flowing, two hundred feet deep, over the same spot 40 years ago.’

Exhibition Catalogue: ‘The Skies are for All: Ruskin and Climate Change’