The 19th century landscape paintings hanging in London’s Tate Britain museum looked awfully familiar to climate physicist Anna Lea Albright. Artist Joseph Mallord William Turner’s signature way of shrouding his vistas in fog and smoke reminded Albright of her own research tracking air pollution.
“I started wondering if there was a connection,” says Albright, who had been visiting the museum on a day off from the Laboratory for Dynamical Meteorology in Paris. After all, Turner — a forerunner of the impressionist movement — was painting as Britain’s industrial revolution gathered steam, and a growing number of belching manufacturing plants earned London the nickname “The Big Smoke.”
Turner’s early works, such
→ Continue reading at Science News