Traces of a Changing Sky

Poetic light through the byproduct of modernity.

The blankets of haze that have settled over the Northeastern United States this year have had both an air of apocalyptic doom, as well as the poetic beauty of filtered light, hearkening to our love of artists who capturing delicate light.

Claude Monet: Impression, Sunrise, 1872, oil on canvas, 18¾ by 24¾ inches. COURTESY MARMOTTAN MUSEUM OF MONET, PARIS via Artnet

This dreamy haziness brings to mind the irreverent works of Turner and Monet – painters who all worked in a time period of great industrial changed that brought a change to the urban atmosphere similar to that of the effects of the Canadian Wildfires.

In a recent interview with CNN, Anna Lea Albright, a postdoctoral researcher for Le Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique at Sorbonne University in Paris, noted the stylistic changes that occurred in both Turner and Monet’s works as the historic record shows air pollution increased. She adds, “The contours of their paintings became hazier, the palette appeared whiter and the style changed from more figurative to more impressionistic: Those changes accord with physical expectations of how air pollution influences light”.

The research team looked at over 100 paintings by Monet and Joseph William Turner, two artists who prolifically painted landscapes and cityscapes with the goal of finding an empirical basis to the hypothesis that the paintings capture increasingly polluted skies during the Industrial Revolution.

“In general, air pollution makes objects appear hazier, makes it harder to identify their edges, and gives the scene a whiter tint, because pollution reflects visible light of all wavelengths,” Albright said.

The team looked for these two metrics, edge strength and whiteness, in the paintings — by converting them into mathematical representations based on brightness — and then compared the results with independent estimates of historical air pollution.

“We found that there was a surprisingly good match,” Albright said.

And of course, where science meets art there’s always a discussion, the changing skies are certainly an external stimulus, but the intrinsic vision to create works that inspire us to this day is what defines these paintings.

More details from the full interview are available at CNN.