ABSTRACT
John Ruskin’s art and writing are heavily indebted to J. M. W. Turner, and numerous critics have accordingly argued that Ruskin’s more successful works could not exist without the painter’s influence. In this chapter, I first examine Turner’s interest in air and water pollution in paintings such as The Fighting Téméraire (1838), Snow Storm (1842), and Rain, Steam and Speed-The Great Western Railway (1844), and Ruskin’s responses to them in his early volumes of Modern Painters (1843–1845) through The Harbours of England (1856), to his two lectures The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century (1884). I then address significant questions about nineteenth-century ecological reflections on the sky and water, the relationship between natural disasters and episodes of human exploitation, and the affiliations between Romantic environmental art and writing with Victorian environmentalism.
