John Constable, Luke Howard, and the Aesthetics of Climate

Abstract

Abstract In early nineteenth-century Britain, the painter John Constable and meteorologist Luke Howard experimented with new aesthetic forms in response to the challenges climate posed to representation. In landscape paintings, sketches, tables, and graphs, the artist and scientist grappled with climate’s temporal scale, which extended beyond the domain of immediate “feeling” associated with landscape representation. Their efforts to construct a stable representation of England’s climate took shape against the polluted atmosphere of industrial, imperial London, and in tandem with the modern state’s disciplinary visuality. In their work, an aesthetics of climate emerged that was responsive to an environment increasingly known through numeric data and abstraction.