The Late Weather:
Art and Climate in Nineteenth-century Britain

A new history of nineteenth-century British art, centred on changing understandings of climate and the natural world. 

The Late Weather examines the emergence of climate as a key subject of artistic experiment and scientific representation in nineteenth-century Britain. It reinterprets the work of central figures, such as John Constable, J. M. W. Turner, W. H. F. Talbot, Julia Margaret Cameron, John Ruskin and James McNeill Whistler, and showcases experimental images across art and science. The book examines a wide range of objects – from landscape paintings to iron-and-glass botanical architecture, complex meteorological instruments to intricate exhibition designs – and, through them, reveals the ways in which new understandings of climate placed pressure on existing modes of representation and shaped the development of artistic mediums in modernity.   

This book is the first monographic study of British art from an environmental perspective. It situates the environmental history of art at the charged nexus of industrial capitalism, accelerating urbanisation and deepening colonial entanglement. Drawing on deep archival research and close engagement with period critics and scientists, the book surfaces climate as a concept shaping art practice and criticism and presents a new genealogy of the images that continue to shape our understanding of climate, and climate crisis, today.