Vortrag Sarah Gould: The Smoky Canvas: Pollution and Paint in 19th Century British Art

When it comes to the iconic images of the industrial revolutions, it was 19th-century British landscape painting that first made visible the rise of the “dark Satanic mills.” Artists such as Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg, Joseph Mallord William Turner, and James McNeill Whistler depicted urban and ecological transformations through industrial sites and cities under clouds of smoke. But these paintings were not simply representations. The talk will look at how the causal relationships between pollution, visuality, and painting came to be diagrammed over the long 19th century. The aim is to consider painting not just as a document or illustration, but as an agent and mediator of environmental change.