Explore how artists have seen and responded to our changing environment, as industrialisation revolutionised the modern world—and set us on the path to climate crisis.
When we think about landscape art—the artistic study of nature as its own specific topic—it might feel like a traditional and familiar part of our visual culture. But in the West it’s actually quite a recent development, with artists only turning their focus onto the natural world in the 17th century.
Art and the Anthropocene
Even before large-scale industrialisation and urbanisation, humans had long adapted the landscape to meet our needs, whether by clearing land or planting crops. Some of the earliest artistic depictions of this human influence on the landscape can be found in Dutch art from the 17th century.
The Dutch have a long history of land reclamation, having effectively created vast areas of their country using windmills to drain lakes and wetlands. There was a particular sense of pride in this effort to physically create the nation, which caused a boom in artistic depictions of this new human-made land. Far from the untouched idylls and stylised fantasies of earlier artists, these landscape paintings proudly represented human impact on the land.
Public domain (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Image source
for Moody, atmospheric painting of a Dutch landscape with small windmills visible in the distance
The idea of the Anthropocene, the name some scientists have given to the geological period in which we’re currently living, reflects this dynamic. It’s a period in which our climate is no longer stable and is heating rapidly, which scientists agree is a result of human influences including agriculture, industrialisation and urbanisation.
The concept of an Anthropocene reflects the fact that humans are having a greater impact on the environment than any natural process. Artistic reflections on the natural landscape, historic and contemporary, can help us understand what this means for our world.
Industrial landscapes
From the late 18th century, the Industrial Revolution triggered significant social and environmental changes. Society shifted from a mainly pastoral way of living, towards life and work in more industrial and urbanised settings.
Coal, especially coking coal, was a catalyst for the Industrial Revolution. Cheap and readily available from the coalfields of the north of England, it provided efficient fuel to run steam engines and, importantly, power blast furnaces for iron ore smelting. This was achieved with success by the Darby family at Coalbrookdale, Shropshire—where there was a ready supply of coal and iron ore.
The hive of industrial activity at Coalbrookdale, nestled in the picturesque Shropshire valleys, drew the attention of artists working from the late 18th to early 19th centuries. In Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg’s Coalbrookdale by Night, the human impact on the landscape is immediately apparent. Indeed, the valley landscape is hardly visible, cottages and figures in the foreground are dwarfed by the central subject—a magnificent blaze of fierce flame and light from the blast furnaces beyond.
The picture doesn’t reflect the full reality of how the ironworks would have looked or worked, but for de Loutherbourg, this isn’t the point. He captures a sense of the Industrial Revolution’s action and change in progress. Elements of tradition—in the cottage-like buildings and homely figures of the woman and child—contrast with the modern forms of the smoke towers, the scrap iron strewn along the roadside and, of course, the hell-like furnace blaze.
Many artists were excited and inspired by the progress and invention during the period. Like de Loutherbourg, JMW Turner also sought to capture the thrill and spectacle of the changes happening. Rain, Steam and Speed shows a train hurtling through the countryside—outpacing a nearby boat sitting placidly in the lake. Through impactful light and powerful movement, both artists capture a sense of dynamism, drama, and even positivity around the profound changes that were happening in Britain.
Some see the use of fossil fuels, especially coal, during the Industrial Revolution as marking the beginning of the Anthropocene. Through this lens, the contrast between industry and rurality in images such as Coalbrookdale by Night seems symbolic of a profound change in the relationship between humans and the environment, and our destructive impact on it. The power and dynamism of the 19th century's new technologies have a different inflection from our 21st-century vantage point in the midst of a coal-fuelled climate crisis.
The impact of industrialisation
While rapid industrialisation brought progress, profit and development to Britain, it was also criticised at the time for the destructive impact it wreaked on people’s lives and the environment.
James Nasmyth, on a visit to Dudley in 1830, described changes he could see in the area:
Amidst these flaming, smoky, clanging works, I beheld the remains of what had once been happy farmhouses, now ruined and deserted… They had in former times been surrounded by clumps of trees but only the skeletons of them remained, dilapidated, black and lifeless. The grass had been parched and killed by the vapours of sulphureous acid thrown out by the chimneys...
James Nasmyth
A print of Manchester’s skyline from 1834 shares Nasmyth’s jarring contrast between the rural and industrial. The foreground is full of countryside motifs—sheep, dairymaids and horse riding. Our eyes are then led to the church and cathedral spires, before we realise the spires are outnumbered by chimneys billowing smoke, dotted across the skyline and visible into the distant horizon—symbols of the heavy industry now dominating the sprawling city.
And now the innumerable chimneys come into view, tall and dim and in the dun haze, each bearing atop its own troubled pennon of darkness.
Hugh Miller, First Impressions of England and its People (1847)
Concerns also grew for the health and wellbeing of the workers who migrated to industrial areas at this time. Working-class communities were subject to overcrowded and unsanitary living conditions, as well as back-breaking, often dangerous labour in forges and factories. There was concern that industrialism was blurring the distinction between people and machinery. Public health reformer Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth noted that:
Whilst the engine runs the people must work – men, women, and children are yoked together with iron and steam.
James Kay Shuttleworth
As the Industrial Revolution progressed, some artists and writers became concerned about its impact on the environment and society, about the detachment of workers from their humanity that Shuttleworth had noted.
Famous now for his rich floral textile designs, William Morris (1834–1896) was not only a designer with an aesthetic interest in nature, but also a social campaigner passionate about humanity’s relationship with the environment. He distained the environmental pollution and societal injustices that rose from the Industrial Revolution, and drew a connection between the poor quality of life endured by working people and alienation from the natural world.
Morris’ designs and company ethos have been described as a form of artistic protest against the industrialism of his time, and his ideas resonate in some ways with our contemporary ideas of sustainability. He believed people should have greater agency over their work, rather than simply being components in an industrial manufacturing system which exploited the natural environment.
At this time, art was also being used to inform and share images of nature with urban populations. A striking example is a pair of paintings of ash trees, one set in winter and another in summer, by James Hey Davies (1844–1930). These were displayed in Ancoats, Manchester, to introduce an idea of the countryside and seasons to residents used to a densely crowded and polluted city, with very little opportunity to experience nature.
Contemporary perspectives
With growing awareness of our impact on the environment, contemporary artists have been responding to the notion of the Anthropocene and our relationship with the natural world.
In 2018, artist Olafur Eliasson and geologist Minik Rosing installed Ice Watch, a work comprising 24 blocks of ice, outside the Tate Modern in London. Each block had broken off the Greenland ice sheet, and was flown to London. Eliasson and Rosing were utilising the landscape to create art, with the transport for each block producing the same carbon footprint as a person flying to witness the ice melting in situ.
Tim White, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0, via Flickr
Image source
for Large white chunks of ice in front of a large brick building. A red banner reads Welcome to Tate Modern
Viewers were encouraged to touch and feel the ice, to form a more tangible connection with the environment—especially one so alien and distant for most of us as an ice sheet. Audiences described how quickly the ice blocks were dissolving, and yet these fragments had been created over tens of thousands of years.
This contrast between their age and their frighteningly fast melting rate was a simple and direct reminder, in the heart of London, of the impact of our mounting climate crisis. Thinking about the paintings and prints above, we can also see a contrast across art history between the intense heat and fossil-fuelled action of Coalbrookdale by Night, and the coldness and stillness of the ice blocks, victims of humanity’s coal-powered progress.
New landscapes
Chinese artist Yao Lu’s photographs, from his 2009 New Landscapes series may at first give a serene view of his homeland. His work draws on China’s landscape painting tradition, in which scenes of mountains, rivers and waterfalls convey ideas of harmony and beauty within nature. Take a closer look at Yao Lu’s work, however, and you’ll find the reality is very different from the idylls of the old masters.
Science Museum Group Collection
The artist subverts traditional motifs by using scenes from construction sites and polluted land, expressing his concern at the pace of China’s urbanisation and environmental change. The ‘mountains’ depicted are in fact heaps of rubble, verdant grass is revealed as miles of green plastic netting. Even the man-made but traditional stone walls and wooden buildings in Spring in the City clash against the concrete rubble from contemporary construction. In Yao Lu’s photo-collages, a Chinese tradition which celebrates and harmonises with nature collides uncomfortably with modern China’s destructive development.
Science Museum Group Collection
Art for the environment
Climate change’s complexity as an issue has not dissuaded people from taking action. In recent years, young artists have been creating protest art about the environment.
In 2019, thousands of young people across the world walked out of school, college, or university on a youth strike for the climate. Far from just documenting and observing the world around them, protester-artists used placards with drawings, designs and writing to draw attention to the environmental crisis. Their messages reflect the feeling that today’s adults aren’t doing enough to safeguard the planet for the future.
Differently from artists before, young protestors are unambiguously and directly asking grown-ups to stop contemplating climate change, and to start taking action. These placard artworks are no longer simply about the environment, they are working to save it.
Find out more
Online
- BBC Culture, The climate change clues hidden in art history
- The Guardian, Interview with John Akomfrah
- My Modern Met, 6 Environmental Artists Who Celebrate Nature and Promote Positive Social Change
- Suzanne O'Rourke Scanlon, The Medievalism of William Morris
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Science Museum Journal, Made real: artifice and accuracy in nineteenth-century scientific illustration
