British Art and the Environment: Changes, Challenges, and Responses Since the Industrial Revolution ed. by Charlotte Gould and Sophie Mesplède (review)

British Art and the Environment: Changes, Challenges, and Responses Since the Industrial Revolution brings together a range of essays that will be of interest to both Victorian scholars and those with an interest in Victorian afterlives, industrial aftermaths, and the heritage industry. The volume is generously illustrated, with an impressive and helpful quantity of color plates. It also contains two in-depth interviews, conducted by the editors, firstly with the artist and curator Tim Martin, and later with Adrian George, Director of Exhibitions and Museum Services at ArtScience Museum, Singapore. Both interviews are wide-ranging and engage with an array of practical concerns about preserving and representing nineteenth-century environments, while also, in Martin’s case, bringing silenced histories to the fore. With references to Brexit and the COVID-19 global pandemic, this is a volume that is acutely concerned with the contemporary and how we deal with Victorian environmental legacies.

Reminding readers of the origins of the word “environment,” which was introduced into the English language by Thomas Carlyle in 1828, the collection’s editors Charlotte Gould and Sophie Mesplède have adopted a capacious interpretation of the word, following Paul Warde, Libby Robin, and Sverker Sörlin in understanding the environment as “the name for, well, everything on the planet being connected” (Warde, Robin, and Sörlin, The Environment: A History of the Idea [Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018], 27). This book is primarily concerned with the Anglocene (a term coined by the French historians Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz to reflect the British, and later American, impact on the climate), and the environmental aftershocks of the Industrial Revolution. Arranged in three sections, the essays move back and forth, from the past to the present. The authors resist the idea of a united kingdom and read Scottish and Welsh landscapes as sites often viewed and painted through imperial eyes.

Part one considers the influence of the Claude Lorrain glass and begins with a fascinating essay by Amy C. Wallace on the artist and critic Philip Gilbert Hamerton and his portable studio. Hamerton was deeply influenced by John Ruskin (a figure of great importance to almost all the authors in this collection) and committed himself to painting directly from nature. As a landscape painter, Hamerton responded to the trials of the British climate by inventing and using a portable studio, essentially a hut to be assembled by the artist’s trusty servant.

The portable hut was to prove unwieldy and was superseded by a studio tent with a large rectangular glass window. Wallace argues that the window constituted a framing device for Hamerton, assisting in the conceptualization of his landscapes. However, there were definite pitfalls associated with the portable studio, with the German artist Hubert von Herkomer reporting that his studio (adapted from Hamerton’s design) was flooded with a foot of water, and Hamerton himself noting that painting at high altitude was impossible since fog inhibited his view from the window. For Wallace, these studios are optical devices like the Claude glass, allowing the painter to “contain nature,” while helping privileged landscape painters to work in all but the very worst climatic conditions (39).

Laura Valette picks up on Wallace’s concern with fog in her chapter, which addresses James McNeill Whistler’s work to advance the aesthetic qualities of fog, particularly in urban landscapes. Valette argues that “weather became atmosphere in the work of an artist whose nocturnes presented fog as a uniquely enveloping and contemplative element” (44). She is scrupulous in distinguishing between natural fog and human-generated smog, while noting that the term “smog” (a portmanteau of the words “smoke” and “fog”) was not coined until 1904 (45). As Valette notes, Whistler’s interests in the aesthetics of fog were heightened by discussions relating to urban air...