 Great, I think we'll get started. We've got a lot to pack in over the next couple of hours, really exciting couple of hours in prospect. And so I thought, I think we should get going. So my name is Mark Hallett, I'm the director of studies at the PMC here in London. I'm sitting in my office and one of the last few days I'm allowed to do so before our lockdown happens. But it's wonderful to welcome all of you, wherever you are to our webinar, Observations Meteorology, which is part of our British art and natural forces programme. Now, this online programme of research events, it's more than 10 in number in total, focus on the encounter between artistic and art historical practice and the forces of the natural world. And it places such encounters in both contemporary and historical perspectives. And the series, just a reminder, will culminate with a panel discussion on Thursday, the 3rd of December. So it's running right through the next few weeks. Recording of the events that have already happened and more information about the series itself can be found on our website. So today's webinar is going to be chaired by Julia Lum, who I'm delighted to introduce, who's got up very early in the morning in California to join us. So welcome, Julia. Julia Lum is assistant professor of art history at Scripps College, where she teaches courses in history of photography, visual cultures of empire and the art of Pacific voyaging. She researches topics related to art and culture in the 18th century to the present in Britain and the form of British empire, focusing on points of intersection and collision between indigenous and colonial cultural practices in the Pacific. Julia is someone that we really enjoyed working with on a number of occasions over the last few years. And her writings have been published in Journal 18, our own journal, British art studies, visual studies and shift. So I think it's a good time now to turn over to you, Julia, to chair the session. Thank you. Thank you very much, Mark. It's a pleasure and an honor to be here. Before we begin and before I introduce our speakers, I'd like to take us through just a few housekeeping points. So just to note that you will be automatically muted when you join the webinar and can only communicate verbally if the host unmutes you. Each talk will last approximately 20 minutes and we'll have scheduled, we have scheduled plenty of time for discussion where we will invite you to ask questions. We'll actually have the first talks followed by a short Q&A period followed by the second two talks and a final Q&A period. You can use the Q&A box at the bottom of your screen to ask or write your questions, but you can also use the virtual raise hand button, the blue hand if you have a question or comment and someone will unmute you and you'll be able to ask the speakers yourself. You can also use the chat box to make comments or to let us know if you're experiencing any technical difficulties. The session, just to note, will be recorded, but no photos should be taken and needless to say, any offensive behavior will not be tolerated and attendees will be removed from the webinar by the host if such a thing should occur. And I think that brings us to the conclusion of our housekeeping. So it's my pleasure to introduce our first panelist who is Dr. Mark Chetham. Mark Chetham is the author of books, volumes and articles on topics including Emmanuel Kant and art history, abstract art, postmodernism, and the environmental humanities. His book, Art Writing, Nation and Cosmopolitanism in Britain, the Englishness of English art history since the 18th century appeared in 2012 and this was followed by landscape into eco-art, articulations of nature since the 1960s, which was published more recently in 2018. Mark is the professor of art history at the University of Toronto. And today he'll be presenting a paper entitled Storm Clouds, Play Clouds and Laundry Lines of the 19th century, Domestic Meteorology of Board Arctic Voyages from Britain. So welcome Mark and I'll hand it over to you. Thank you very much, Julia. I'm hoping that you can see my first image there. Somebody can put up a sad face or something if you can't. Thanks Mark. I also just very quickly want to thank Ella and Danny and of course, Mark Hallett for organizing this. It's really an honor and a pleasure to participate even at a distance. And I'm really looking forward to hearing Ben and Sarah and Nick as well. Thanks very much. The Arctic is often in the news these days as a site of climate crisis. Antiprogenic effects on both short and longer term weather and climate are accelerated in these regions, yet what is happening at both poles was not largely initiated there, nor do its effects on humans, on other beings, the water and the land remain in the cryosphere. Most people, I think we could safely say have been deaf and blind to the planet's northerly early warning systems. To adapt John F. Kennedy's much quoted motto about Berlin during the communist blockade of the city in 1963, Expinion Berliner, metaphorically, we all live in the Arctic today. Olafur Eliessen has raised this alarm with ice watch and in a different register, but also in the Thames River recently. So has extension rebellion with the sinking house. I gather, unfortunately from a distance these days that bringing the Arctic and its resilient cultures to Londoners is also part of the premise of the British Museum's current exhibit, Arctic culture and climate. British foragers have been delivering captive peoples and animals, minerals and a wealth of other materials to Britain since the mid 16th century. Lampoons, such as this one by Crookshank, not withstanding, this practice has been pictured as a largely heroic set of adventures to extend empire. My simple claim today is that this heroization of explorers, ships, exploits and of course of extreme natural forces to be seen and overcome is only one pole, we might say, in the longstanding British obsession with the Arctic and what has since 1999 been a largely self-governed region of Nunavut. I want to turn our attention instead to the quotidian aspects of nature, scientific record keeping and visual culture around British voyaging to the Arctic in the 19th century. One term I use to capture such practices is domestic, though I have inklings that this is not always the right word and will seek your assistance there. So I use cognates such as quotidian routine ordinary. Such terms suggest different adhesions from gender to the routines of technology in gathering meteorological data. Art history and visual culture do not recognize and examine these everyday images of Arctic voyaging to the extent that these fields lionize their more dramatic and melodramatic 19th century counterparts. I don't need to invoke the sublime fantasies of land seer or church to make this point. In fact, I didn't even put the images in. Cult dates certainly existed in more downscale industry of producing Arctic imagery in books, illustrations, prints and especially the elaborate and commercially successful panoramas that toured Britain at this time that you see here which depict everyday activities in a sublime landscape. Acknowledging Andrew Patrizio's excellent point in his recent plenary about concerns with ecology not always being bound to those of landscape and land, I suggest that we can look elsewhere too. Heroic portraits of Arctic worthies in groups such as this one by Pierce or solo again by Pierce outweighs simpler depictions of what we call first contact. In this case, double first contact between the Inuit and the white explorers and between two groups of Inuit who did not know one another until this meeting. This is not an example that you saw briefly there on the screen of the unidirectional colonial gaze. However, as the artist is a man named John Sackos and Inuk from Greenland to travel voluntarily to Leith, Scotland in 1816 and received artistic training elsewhere in Scotland. He also brought negotiated for and Ross brought back the sled that you see at the top which I wonder if it's in the British Museum exhibit because it's in the British Museum. Because Sackos' first contact image was published in Ross's account of his voyage which was a best seller it would have been seen by many more people at the time than saw Pierce's portraits somewhat later. Of course, no one was more hallowed in Arctic lore and image making than John Franklin who in 1845 departed on what was designed to be the ultimate discovery of the Northwest passage. The disappearance of his ships, Arabus and terror triggered what has been called the most extensive manhunt of the 19th century. The arrow there shows the imagined burial of Franklin on this monument. He and his 128 sailor crew perished in grisly circumstances including cannibalism. Narratives and visual effects are central to this narrative whether your Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens writing and performing the racist and much acclaimed play The Frozen Deep of 1856 or closer to our own time Dan Simmons in his novel of 2007 called The Terror. The basis of a truly frightening and for me highly recommended television series of the same name in 2018. Or even the inoc contemporary inoc artist Danny Alec who is likewise fascinated with the still unknown burial place of Franklin at the apex or actually I think the nadir of this often melodramatic cohort is this painting now lost sadly by the Austrian Hungarian explorer and painter Julius von Payer. Just as the Arctic voyages were more often a slog than an adventure imagery produced in and about the Arctic by British amateur and professional artists included a range of quotidian views and records many of which stemmed from and extended scientific interests including those of the nascent field of meteorology. What I am proposing is that we think of the routines of scientific measurement aboard ship as part of the crew's domestic life. An unremarked visual sign of the sailor's routine is the depiction of laundry lines surprising content if we're used to witnessing the sublime and the heroic. Owen Stanley's highly accomplished watercolors from his time in the Arctic aboard the terror same ship earlier in 1836 and seven are case in point. Stanley sailed under George back himself a talented amateur artist. Another instance of the laundry lines is this photograph of a slaughtered walrus in front of George's strong nearship alert in the ice during the unsuccessful and highly controversial British Arctic expedition to the North Pole in 1875 to six. The British Admiralty was punctilious about observational schedules. This image shows those binding Captain John Ross going back to that earlier 1818 expedition. Ross's nephew J.C. Ross pinpointed the North magnetic pole in June of 1831. This is from the publication of that discovery through similarly careful measurement. The abstractness of numbers and charts in these publications had the advantage of almost universal translatability except notably with the Inuit and it facilitated communication at a distance. The specific and local are measured and recorded here but in a way that is not only local. Data can be compared instantly across the planet or indeed more importantly across the British Empire. An infrastructure of measurement and comparison was established through these communications and publications. I call this imperial empiricism. It delivered assurance, universality and dominance. To return to my title about storm clouds and plague clouds and laundry lines without suggesting any causality, the storm and plague clouds that John Ruskin referred to in his famous 1884 essay, The Storm Cloud of the 19th century and in his earlier plea for observations of the eye which he called remarks on the present state of meteorological science published in 1839 provide apt context in which to consider what I would claim is the twin concern for the domestic and heroic in the Arctic visual culture in the 19th century. Ruskin intones about how observed changes in the weather are what we would now call anthropogenic effects. Quoting Ruskin, not that I could ever write this way. The wind is the plague wind of the eighth decade of years in the 19th century, he said in Storm Cloud. A period which will assuredly be recognized in future meteorological history as one of phenomena hitherto unrecorded in the courses of nature and characterized preeminently by the almost ceaseless action of this calamitous wind. His themes are as sweeping as his prose, yet his entreaty is simply for attention by the human eye to the everyday. The laundry lines that we see on the decks of these vessels are themselves more than washing. I would say that there are signs of a primary challenge to 19th century seafaring technologies. Damp was a serious issue aboard these ships, precipitated because Arctic temperatures were usually well below freezing, we know that, and the centrally heated ships interiors were quite hot, which we don't usually remember, leading to condensation. The local meteorology caused health problems as well as discomfort. Innovations in so-called airing rooms always seemed to fall short. Nowhere is the intimacy of the heroic and domestic shown with such force and complexity as in one of the most popular paintings of the entire Victorian era in Britain, John Everett Millay's The Northwest Passage of 1874, which was presented at the Royal Academy of Arts in the annual summer exhibition of that year. John Guy Millay, the artist's son and biographer reported in 1899 that this picture was, quote, perhaps the most popular of all Millay's paintings at the time. Over 300,000 people attended the exhibition. Today, I would say that we can appreciate Millay's painting as a meta-picture because it allows us to ponder the implications of Arctic voyaging then and now as a narrative about Britain's past imperial exploits in that region, attitudes towards such heroics in around 1874, and in terms of the future glory that it projects with its bombastic subtitle, and I apologize for the blurriness of this slide from the RA catalog. It's bombastic subtitle. It might be done and England should do it. Viewers at the time understood that Millay's Northwest Passage was not primarily about the Northwest Passage in the Arctic. Instead, the painting and its reception projected a complex temporality that looks back to heroic voyages personified by the old sailor and ahead temporarily to Nair's imminent departure on the British Arctic Expedition of 1875 to six that I just mentioned to find the North geographic pole. A 19th century source explains why Millay's painting only refers to the passage in retrospect despite its title, and I'm quoting from this source. The subject has only a general reference to Arctic discovery. For the Northwest Passage, the mere possibility of getting sea-wise from the Atlantic to the Pacific by the North had long been proved when the picture was painted. The old sailor was modeled on Edward John Trelawney. For the many Victorians viewers who recognize this roguish figure, he was the personification of a romantic past. Friend of Millay, Byron and Shelley combatant in the Battle of Trafalgar. We are reminded of his pedigree by a picture of Lord Nelson that hangs above him. He rests his left arm and hand on a cloth-covered table across which is spread an open chart. On this table, we also see two bouquets of flowers, one on each side of the chart, partly supporting it. Close examination suggests that this map is by McClure. A basket on the floor at the far right has one flower draped over it, implying recent excursion to the garden. On the table lie British flags, a Union Jack and a Royal Navy white ensign. The types used by Arctic expeditions to mark encampments and to claim land, including the North magnetic pole, which was ironic given that the North magnetic pole moves, which didn't stop them from using flags on it. The flags spill out onto the table in a way that mirrors the cascade of the woman's skirts across the floor. She is perennially identified as the sailor's daughter. Her head is framed by the map. She looks down at a book on her lap. Her left index finger marks a point on the page while she rests her hand consolingly over her father's clothes. Some have suggested clenched right fist. Though assumptions have been made, we cannot be sure what type of book this is that she's looking at or whether the woman is reading from it or pointing to an illustration. We might imagine that she reads from or points to the published record of McClure's famous voyage, which was illustrated and from which the map on the table could easily have been separated. Two other books lean against the leg of a smaller table at the right of the painting. Actually, yes, at the left of the painting. The topmost is clearly labeled log book. Here is just one example of the kinds of log books. From this time, we don't know which one this is. Many details here suggest that the past, both of Britain's arctic voyages and of the sailor himself are depicted. McClure's map was almost 25 years old by 1874. While the painting of the ship and the ice is not identified, there were dozens of such expeditions at this time. Many ships were destroyed by pack ice, including McClure's HMS investigator, which was famously trapped in the ice for three years and abandoned in 1853. Its wreck was found in 2010. There are numerous images of this calamity in the visual culture of the time. So I'm suggesting that Millay has simply deposited a stock picture. The image of Nelson that I mentioned before, who died heroically at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, proclaims the legacy of British noble heroism and physical sacrifice. You'll recall that poor Nelson had lost both an arm and an eye by age 40 from his exploits. A tripartite temporality weaves through the fabric of this painting. If we imagine that the sailor is not fully engaged with his daughter in the present, that he is instead recalling his past or visualizing the future perhaps of the Nair's mission. The painting nonetheless insists on domestic material realities in the moment, including her actions, the fresh flowers, the fruit, the libation on the table, the weather outside, and the passing sailboat that we see behind the sailor. We might also hear several voices in the present, that of the daughter and those of viewers at the Royal Academy as they vocalized the popular motto that became the de facto subtitle of this painting. Again, it might be done and England should do it. The mariner is surrounded with the accoutrements of the past exploration, the map and telescope point to the stately but curiously perturbed man. Yet Millay has been careful to place these technologies of external exploration and household life on both tables. Such objects are not divided, but put into mutual play. Moreover, the all important telescope that you see at the left seems to have been used both domestically and professionally. The eyepiece faces into the home ready to hand for either figure to spy the passing sailboat, which is a local craft, not rigged as a three-masted steam-powered naval ship such as alert or discovery of the Nair's expedition the next year. I would suggest that the Northwest Passage is an inverted analog of Arctic territory. Where its details punctuate a homey setting in the South with moments of the far North, the Arctic allows voyagers only partial Southern domesticity of aboard their floating and icebound often homes. Continuous with the Arctic tableaus that the sailor's daughter conjures with her book and the chart and the log book, the flags and the grog is a private reflection of the more elaborate Arctic panoramas in place staged onshore and also aboard ships in the Arctic. Home then was part of a circuit that included away and vice versa. Attempts to make the ships voyaging to the Arctic self-sufficient Victorian capsules included onboard dramas where men played women's parts in true Shakespearean fashion and extremely local newspapers produced on the ships. Male and female, distant and domestic were part of an elaborate and multi-fail and cycle I would suggest that we see in Millet's meta-painting. And I would argue also in the range of imagery about the Arctic that was coming back to Britain. Arctic voyages function fully only when this circle was complete. When voyagers return to recount their exploits, when images of the Arctic were disseminated and when scientific data are presented and discussed. It is this cycle of expansion and return which we can rightly call imperialist and colonial and which was infamously not achieved by Franklin's failed expedition that the Nair's voyage to the Northwest to the North Pole sought to perpetuate. Millet invoked its nationalistic priorities in 1874 and cast them into the future. A future that is our present. I leave you now with a lighter but I think still poignant take on that reality in the Arctic today. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mark for that fascinating paper. We're gonna hold questions for the meantime and transition to our next speaker, Benjamin Pollitt. Dr. Pollitt recently completed his PhD at UCL. His thesis, sympathy unbound, attachment and dissonance in John Weber's Atlas explored visual cultures of material exchange in relation to James Cook's third voyage. His research was funded by critical histories of art studentship from UCL as well as support made available through the Andrew Wilde fund and the Paul Mellon Center. He is currently a cared research fellow at the National Maritime Museum London conducting research under the title color as weather, art and meteorology 1750 to 1900. And he also works as an associate lecturer at the Courtauld Institute. So Dr. Pollitt is presenting a talk today entitled between Westl's chaos and Humboldt's cosmos picturing the weather in 1848. And so after Dr. Pollitt's talk, we'll have question period for both of our speakers so far. So over to you, Ben. Thank you, Julia and thank you, Ella, Danny, Mark for organizing this great. William Westl's The Commencement of the Dalluge was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1848. In the same year, Augustine Pritchard's pirated English translation of the second volume of Alexander von Humboldt's cosmos came out. Cosmos, which ran into five volumes was a supremely ambitious project advancing a holistic conception of science aimed at the general reader. Humboldt saw the first two volumes as complementary presenting nature under a two-fold aspect, first objectively as an actual phenomenon and next subjectively as it is reflected in the feelings of mankind. Thus volume one explains the workings of nature while volume two explores the variety of human artistic responses to them. In the latter, Humboldt argues that the three arts which have done most to promote the study of nature, are haughty culture, nature writing and landscape painting. Cosmos draws frequently on the material Humboldt gathered 40 years earlier between 1799 and 1804 on his scientific expedition to South America. William Westl is perhaps best known for having accompanied Matthew Flinders survey of the coast of Australia in 1801 to 1803. Overseeing the expedition was the president of the Royal Society, Joseph Banks, who would also of course champion the idea of Australia as a penal colony. And before I continue, I'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands featured in this talk and to recognize their continuing connection to them. So after the voyage, Westl produced a series of paintings that were made into engravings to illustrate Flinders narrative of voyage to terror Australis. He also produced coastal profiles that featured in the separate atlas for volume, which included Flinders map of Australia and templates after the work of the ship's botanical artist, Ferdinand Bauer. The range of this visual material is helpful in thinking about the relationships between artistic and scientific communities at the beginning of the 19th century. In Humboldt's work, however, we find something quite different. Self-conscious attempt to unite these communities within himself and resolve the tensions between them. This is illustrated in the image that Formal Centerpiece for his book, Essay on the Geography of Plants, 1805, which details the observations he made during his travels in the Ecuadorian Andes. It shows a cross-section view of the volcanoes in Baratso and Cotopaxi. Together with a range of information gathered during his ascent of these mountains arranged in columns on either side. It is a remarkable composite diagram to which in Humboldt's French version of the text, he gives the title Tableau, a painting and a table simultaneously. The extent to which the image was intended to be contemplated aesthetically or read for information is a matter of debate. This concern with the interplay between the aesthetic and the analytical is the recurrent theme in Humboldt's work. It is present too in the book's dedication page, which above the inscription to Goethe, Apollo with his lyre is shown unveiling the personification of nature. Goethe and Humboldt were lifelong friends and if there is a Faustian quality in the character of this ambitious scientist, it may well be because the figure of Faust was based on him. All theory is gray, Faust famously complains, but forever green is the tree of life, a sentiment that sums up Humboldt's insistence on the importance of feeling in the study of nature. Our effective responses to the natural world are central to the arguments he develops in a series of essays in the second volume of Cosmos. In reviewing the work, John Herschel describes the theme of these essays as the reflex action of the imaginative faculty when excited by the contemplation of the external world as exemplified in the production of poetic descriptions of nature, especially of wild and landscape scenery and landscape painting. As an example, Humboldt draws on the work of the Sanskrit poet Kalidasa, whose Megaduta or cloud messenger was translated into English in 1813, which Goethe read and wrote about enthusiastically. The poem tells of a cloud charged with carrying a message from a Hindu deity who has been sent into exile in central India to his wife in the North. Humboldt particularly commends the way Kalidasa describes the joyful welcome of the cloud or rain when it arrives, capturing the sense of relief that is felt with the coming of rain after a long period of drought. The story reminds him of his own experience in South America when on the other side of the world he observed the same meteorological processes of a monsoon climate. Only those who have wandered in such regions of the earth will know how this feels, Humboldt writes, he alone can feel how almost infinite is the field which still remains to be opened to landscape painting and how all that this department of art has yet produced is not to be compared to the magnitude of the treasures of which at some future day it may become possessed. One person who wandered in such regions is Westerl whose depiction of Pobaso's island, one of a series of islands between Australia and Indonesia successfully conveys the suffocating heat that were there complained of as a heavy rain cloud approaches. Surprisingly, however, Westerl appears not to have been very impressed by this in a letter to banks written in January 1804 he states that Australia in its general appearance differs little from the northern parts of England. The letter lays out Westerl's reasons for not returning to England where he was to have handed over his sketches to the Admiralty. Instead, he decided to travel to Salon, a country where I could scarcely fail of success for the rich and picturesque appearance of that island. Every part of forwarding infinite variety must produce many subjects to a painter extremely valuable. The contents of the letter raise questions as to Westerl's character, how selfish and ungrateful he seems writing so disparagingly about this country that his patron had invested so much in. Would banks really have been so displeased with this comparison to England though or upset at the idea that Australia did not have the rich and picturesque appearance of Salon? For banks, these qualities may well have stood in the country's favor. In terms of its picturesque character or lack of it, being more concerned with the effects on the eye than the underlying structure and composition of the landscape, for banks, the picturesque stood for a faulty and inferior mode of viewing as compared to the practices of the geological observer. Perhaps then Westerl is not so much denigrating the Australian landscape as much as he is his own profession as a landscape artist as someone who is obliged to chase after the singular and picturesque. The written account of Parbus' island, given in the text, seems more tailored towards banks' standards of observation than the picture. Examining the cliffs sloping down to the water, Flinders writes, the stone of the upper parts is grit or sandstone of a close texture but the lower part of the cliffs is the ardualaceous and stratified, splitting in layers of different thicknesses. The layers are of a reddish color resembling flat tiles and might, I can see, be used as such. There are enough of them to cover a whole town and the sandstone at the top of the cliffs is equally well calculated for building the walls of the houses. Thinking of Humboldt in this context, in respect to nature as an inexhaustible resource to extract form and possess, he and banks were not that different. It is how he linked the study of nature to the beautiful and the wondrous that he set himself apart from the Englishman, the way that he admits to the ways in which nature possesses him. Note the enthusiasm with which he marvels at the clouds, a very interesting phenomenon he writes is the existence of small clouds, commonly called Muton, at over 7,800 meters. How light are these air cells capable of maintaining themselves in such a rarefied atmosphere? The use of figurative languages deliberately playful, encouraging his readers to return to the image to see how sheep-like are the clouds in it. While Humboldt was trekking the Andes, Westall was making sketches of the coast of North Queensland. It is unlikely Humboldt saw this painting. Although he declares William Hodges the greatest landscape painter of the 18th century, Westall, perhaps his closest follower, is not mentioned at all in his essay, Humboldt's essay, due probably to the fact that so few copies of Flinders' account were sold, barely 500. If he had seen it, Humboldt would likely have commended the works individuality of observation. That is to say, it's close observation of individual natural phenomena. Unlike the botanical or zoological artist, however, the artist of distinction in reflecting on the interconnectedness that sustains them would also convey an impression of the relationship between these phenomena, the azure of the sky, the form of clouds, the haze resting on the distance, the succulency of the herbage, the brightness of the foliage, the outline of the mountains. By this means the landscape painter creates a view of nature that compensates for the lack of such natural diversity in Europe itself. In the wealth and culture of languages, in the lively imagination of poets and painters, we find a satisfying substitute as that. The magic of the representational arts transports us to the farthest reaches of the earth. Through language and arts, we live at once in past and present centuries, gathering around us what human effort has discovered in the most distant parts of the globe. We remain equally near to all. Humboldt sees nothing fundamentally wrong in the exploitation of global resources for the benefits of Europeans. In a similar way, viewers of Westeros paintings or prospects will be quite capable of viewing these as picturesque scenes, indeed morally uplifting ones, and also as potential sites of possession for the British. The autonomy of Westeros artworks was sacrificed to instrumentality in another sense, too. As the title appeared in the Royal Academy catalogue makes it clear, the painting was commissioned to illustrate Flinders voyage, that is, to tell a story. In the visual sequence, Boboss's Island marks the furthest point on their voyage before they turn back to Paul Jackson. The image that follows is a view of one of a chain of reefs known as wreck reef, around 250 miles off the Queensland coast in the Coral Sea. Having left their ship, the investigator, which was deemed no longer to be seaworthy, most of the crew joined a commercial vessel called the porpoise, one of a convoy of three ships that would take them back to England. Sailing close to the Great Barrier Reef, however, they ran into a storm and two of the ships, including the porpoise, were dashed onto the coral. Three men died, the rest set up camp on a small rocky island close to the wreck site. For Westall, the incident was particularly devastating. Water had flooded his cabin, destroying all his finished sketches, that is, according to Banks' account, a loss which goes a long way to explain his unwillingness to return immediately to England. The sketches that were saved, 140 in all, were mainly very slight and damaged. While Flinders sailed off to get help, Westall and the others remained stranded on the island for 51 days. Here we see it among the coral, whose delicate brittle forms destroyed their tall ships. The tents that once were their sails look feeble now in comparison, threatened at any moment to be swept away by a single wave. If standing here, we sense our feet wading in the water, turning around, we would see only the ocean stretching out before us. Eventually, Flinders returned with help. In the months that followed, though news reached Westall's friends and family in England that, though safe, his head had been affected by the incident. It obviously left its mark. The last image he was working on before he died, almost 50 years later, was a study for a painting of the wreck. The ship on the horizon is the Bridgewater, the third ship in the convoy, the captain of which was accused by Flinders of deliberately abandoning them. In the commencement of the deluge, a similar position is taken by Noah's Ark. Through these errant spaces of biography, therefore the image becomes one of displacement and abandonment. From this perspective, there is a cruelty in Humboldt's asats, the satisfying substitute, the animal pairings that stand for the entirety of the species, which, of course, are on the point of being destroyed. Reading the image against the grain in this way, one wonders whether, perhaps, it is from the practices of the asats, the carrying over of pre-existing ideas, impressions, traumas, as much as the physical transportation of plants, animals, and people from which the chaos of the deluge springs. That being said, the act of sinning is shown in the painting seen in the foliage to the left and arm reaches out for an apple, perhaps. Beneath this, other fruits and a body are floating as one might imagine the wreckage of the pauperstead, a ship that was used to transport plants to and from Australia. In the background, the halo around the sun stands as the rainbow of God's covenant to Noah and his descendants, and in Christian iconography, the promise of the resurrection. Taking the narrative still further, the biblical narrative so further, the bird that hovers in the center looks down on the drowning figures, like the winged figure of the archangel Michael on the day of judgment, a reference echoed by the serpent the man wrestles with in the foreground, standing both as the serpent of Eden and the beast of the apocalypse. It illustrates the divine plan from beginning to end. Given the painting's date, the Westall's apocalyptic vision may have a political dimension. It is not the armed struggles that were taking place in the streets of European capitals that would seem to occupy him, though. The painting's strident assertion of religious modes of feeling, I would suggest rather stands in opposition to the sort of systematizing thoughts of thinking that English critics complained about in their reviews of Humboldt's cosmos. It is easy to say, writes the physicist James Forbes, that the ultimate end of the experimental sciences is to ascend to the existence of laws and to generalize them progressively, but where is the inductive process to end? Where is the last generalization of the last and highest group of laws? Others, however, did engage in the political aspects of Humboldt's work, especially his writings on art. In his future imaginary, landscape painters would increasingly travel outside of Europe through the magic of representational art, bring back to their viewers their impressions of the beautiful diversity found in the tropics, and so in ways both therapeutic and morally elevating expand Europe's effective horizons. Humboldt describes the intellectual pleasure to be experienced from this research as quote, a moral freedom that fortifies us against the blows of fate and which no external power can ever reach. In studying nature, therefore, we are developing a form of freedom, an idea that was certainly picked up on by those advocating for political reform in Prussia, supported by Humboldt's own expressions of sympathy for the Revolutionary's cause. In England too, from 1850 onwards, the leader of radical political journal used a quotation from cosmos as its epigraph in which the dismantlement of the distinctions of religion, country, and color is called for in the name of humanity and the free development of our spiritual nature. This idealistic vision seems at odds with the contradictions implicit in Humboldt's eco-criticism, notably how the extraction of natural resources and the channeling of those into Europe can coexist with a sense of the moral and social importance of the natural world. Arguably, part of the difficulty in getting a purchase on these contradictions is the fact that they remain with us still today. Also, and to conclude, as the work of Flinders would seem to indicate, one wonders how the wanderings of the newly mobile artist might not inevitably result in an aesthetics of detachment and lost certainty. Thank you. Thank you very much, Ben. I'm starting to see a lot of the connections between these two wonderful papers and we're up to 67 participants in the webinar currently. I'm wondering if we can take some time to field some questions if the speakers are willing. So if you could please raise your blue hand or enter your question into the Q&A. I think maybe I'll start off with just some general questions and observations of my own. I'm really struck by both of these papers and how they deal with this question of circulation, of mediation of distance between perhaps questions of home or the domestic and these different geographies. And both the geographies of the Arctic and of Australia in particular at this moment in the 19th century become kind of laboratories for examining or observing climate and nature and in extremists. So I'm wondering if the two of you can maybe further articulate some of the sort of connections that you see between perhaps these two papers in this question of nature and its kind of extreme force and the relationship and the relational kind of nature of that to the observer say in England at this time. Okay, I'll say something. Thank you, Julia. That's a really interesting question and thank you for that paper, Ben. I was thinking all the way through that in a way our papers are located at such opposite ends of various different spectra. But as Julia is implying, they do link in many ways. Something that I should know more about than I do but I think might be pertinent to your question, Julia, is how the Arctic was portrayed as exotic. Of course, it was the opposite of the visual and aesthetic flora and fauna abundance of the tropic that Ben has shown us so vividly. But there were many, many claims about not just the subtlety of the Arctic, that might seem like a natural move to make but the drama and the exoticism of things like obviously the aurora borealis of extraordinary animals like that unfortunate slaughtered walrus that we saw in one of my images. So I think what would be interesting and I really wish I had the knowledge to do this but no doubt people out there do would be to put these two regions into a similar frame and a similar dialogue. And I suppose the obvious connector would be Cook since he traveled to both of these exotic regions. And with Humboldt, we have enough on the table to think through but it would be really interesting and I don't know if anyone here knows this how and if James Cook actually made these comparisons since he did voyage to both of those parts of the world. I just, if I may jump in, I also just wanna add that John Franklin and Ben, please correct me if I'm wrong, but John Franklin was on the investigative voyage as a midshipman, is that correct? Yeah, so I mean, maybe if you wanted to talk a little bit more about the investigator's voyage and sort of the, as you described that collection of or that kind of accumulation of inductive material through the lens of Westall as this wandering artist, maybe what was his role in terms of observation on that voyage? And I realize that many of those works were lost but maybe you could tell us a little bit more about his project. Yeah, he was only 19 when he went on, so he was very young and he's the brother of Richard Westall and I think he was a brother-in-law of one of the Daniels so he was connected to the Daniels as well so he's very well connected. And then, but he's also competing with Ferdinand Bauer who's been sitting, I think there's a book on him which describes him as the Leonardo of botanical drawing. So he's competing against, and he's quite a young man, competing against very skilled and proficient another person that there was Robert Brown, the botanist. So I think by temperament, he was quite reserved and Flinders said that he kept himself, he sort of removed himself. I think there's a story, I don't know how true this is that Franklin and others herded a group of sheep over his sketches and the prince of the sort of the sheeps who's still on the drawings. So yeah, there was always a sense of being outside and being a little, I mean, thinking about Cook's voyagers, Webber, who was the artist who does go on this extreme across from the polar regions and the tropics. There weren't really naturalist on that voyage. So he was the authority, whereas by the time Westall comes, I think the question of what the role of the voyage artist here is becoming a little more sort of moot. And then of course, with the disaster that happened and this didn't help with his career later on. And also Flinders was arrested on his way back and by the French and was imprisoned for something like seven years on this island. So the official account didn't come out until about 10 years after, by which time everyone really sort of lost interest. Yeah, okay, that was sorry, a bit of an exposition, but there we are. Julia, you're muted at the moment. Sorry, thank you. I'm looking out for any questions. I don't see any in the hands or any in the Q and A. So, oh, yeah, Mark, go for it. Well, just if we have a moment, I was very struck, Ben, your image of the deluge and having recently been one of the few people that had the chance to see the Turner's Modern World show. And there's a reproduction of the slavers and they're throwing over all of the slavers there. And it struck me in relation to your thematics about whether images like the deluge as well as images like Turner's can be understood as the kind of the obverse or the dark side of that same imagery of imperial exploration and colonial exploration that Westerl also produced. And it just made me wonder about the relationship between this kind of stream of deluge imagery throughout the period and that other imagery that we associate with those kind of colonial landscape paintings and the relationship between the two. Yes, no, that's the inkling that I was running on. I'm just touching on it, but I think that that's, for me, a sort of space to explore more of. But yes, thank you. You've put it really nicely. I'm sure there are other questions and I have my own, but in the interest of time, perhaps we'll move on to the following two papers. Thank you so much to Ben and to Mark and we can return to questions for those two speakers as well if we have time at the very end. So I'd like to now introduce our third speaker, Dr. Sarah Gould. Sarah Gould is a lecturer at Paris 1, Panthéon Sorbonne University and her dissertation entitled, Making Texture Matter, the Materiality of British Painting, 1788 to 1914, was completed under the supervision of Federique Auger. She has two recently published articles on JMW Turner, recently this autumn. And is currently under contract with the French publishing house, Cohen to write a monograph on John Everett Millay, whose work we saw earlier in Mark's talk. This year, she's co-organizing a series of conferences entitled Deconstructing Anthropocentrism, Humanities After Humans. And today's paper is entitled, Matters of Excess in JMW Turner's Painting. So over to you, Sarah. Thank you. Wait, can you hear me? Well, I can hear you, yep. And thank you for inviting me to participate in this event, a really wonderful series of talks. In 2018, the contemporary artist and Royal Academy mission Emma Stibbon produced a large monochrome drawings and why is it not working? Wait a second. And Sianotype photographs of the same alpine landscapes that Turner and Ruskin had represented a century earlier. When juxtaposed with Ruskin's photo of the same place, Stibbon's picture of the Mont-en-Verre esplanade, where the mer de glace bends towards Chamonix at the bottom of the Mont-Blanc, shows the retreat of the glacier and the ravages of climate change. Now 12 kilometers long, the mer de glace is three kilometers shorter than when Turner represented it in 1802. Such images reveal how paradigms of ecological thinking productively complicate our understanding of Turner's work when his pictures are read as celebrations of the British natural environment, captured in paint as it was beginning to be irrevocably altered at the dawn of the industrial revolution. Throughout his career, Turner expressed a fascination for natural forces, such as snow, fire and water and for their destructive power competed and for how their destructive power competed with man-made industrial atmospheres, charged in ash, smoke and steam. To represent the variety of nature and its substances, Turner experimented with facture and different textures of paint. In this paper, I want to look at how his engagement with materiality testifies to the multitude of experiences of early industrialization. When I started writing this paper, little did I know that there would be an exhibition titled Tate Britton entitled Turner's Modern World, focusing precisely on the suspect of Turner's practice. And since, like many of you, I imagine, I'm currently locked down and I would be very grateful to hear from anyone who has managed to see the show. Turner's obtrusive handling was considered excessive by many of his contemporaries. His use of impasto was sometimes thought to thought representation itself. The disruptive dimension of his technique has, in turn, become one of the main entry points for critical evaluations of his work and a hallmark of his modernity. Many who have looked at the question converge on the idea that Turner's treatment of matter is avant-garde because it testifies to a consciousness of form. By contrast, I'd like to propose that an alternative conceptualization of texture as excess might also have something to contribute to how we think about Turner's attention to materials and natural forces. Indeed, it will be by my contention today that through the expressivity of the painterly medium, Turner introduced a new relation to observed matter at once setting him apart from his contemporaries and enabling him to trespass traditional canons of representation. Writing in 1872 to George Richmond's daughter, Julia, Samuel Palmer remembered his 14-year-old self's enthralled and lasting reaction to a painting by Turner. The first exhibition I saw in 1819 is fixed in my memory by the first Turner, the orange merchant up on the bar and being by nature a lover of smudginess, I have rebelled in him from that day to this. Coming from Palmer, an artist close to William Blake in sharing with him a taste for neat lines and definite forms, the choice of the words smudginess is unexpected. Perhaps ironic, the term recalls Turner's contemporaries comments on his obtrusive and blatant factures. In an article published in 1990 entitled Splashes, Scrawlers and Plasterers, British Landscape Painting and the Language of Criticism, 1800, 1840, some smiles looked at how broadly handled landscapes were attacked by critics, artists and connoisseurs in the early 19th century. In his analysis of the language in which these criticisms were couched, smiles showed how loose and vigorous brushstrokes were considered, I quote, all too close to the stuff of nature itself. Pictures that offered the spectacle of disordered nature, the refusals to order nature he continued, may have prompted disapproval precisely because their provincial style may have been felt to question the stability of an ordered world. Different types of extended metaphors appear in criticism of the criticisms of the time. Critics sometimes wondered what food Turner was using, vocabulary drawn from the repertoire of construction materials, mortar, plaster, white wash, chopped hay, reveals the unease many of Turner's contemporaries with the menial associations of such surfaces. By highlighting the ideological undercurrents of this attitude, smiles reveals an ambient tension around the treatment of material surfaces at the time, recalling that this was a matter of ethics as much as decorum. To take a famous example, Ruskin recorded Turner's winded reaction to the criticism that his painting was nothing but a mass of soap suds and a white wash. I heard him muttering to himself at intervals, soap suds and white wash, what would they have? I wonder what they think the seas like, I wish they'd been in it. I'm sorry, this is the best impersonation of Turner I can give you. The term white wash interests me here because it also has to do with the visible traces of erasure with conspicuous concealment. By the same token in Palmer's admiring comment, the word smudginess encapsulated the idea of a trace of something left. The Oxford English Dictionary gives a definition of smudge for this period as the scum of paint. Scum then has to do with surfaces. It is more generally any undesirable surface layer or deposit. The word is also associated with dirt and residue. What is remarkable, I think, is that the subject of this painting also has to do with residues. Oranges lost at sea and fishermen rummaging for them. To declare oneself a lover of smudginess is a strong statement. It underlines a taste for this type of battery texture that is so symptomatic of Turner's use of oil, but it also emphasizes the idea of something left. In Turner's works, these traces are at the same time material evidence of their making and representative metonyms. In his works, they occupy this in-between semiotic space between signified and signifier. Throughout his career, Turner continually depicts what is swept away by the sea. The French art historian Pierre Watt talks about the fact that there is frequently a sense of irreversible loss in Turner's paintings, which incidentally often bear the preposition after in their titles. In his most famous slave ship, Turner tells the story of the captain of the Zong during a journey from Africa to Jamaica in 1781, ordered 133 slaves to be thrown overboard so that insurance payments could be claimed. Here, elemental violence is compared to human violence. There is no fixation on nature as an overwhelming force tamed by enlightened reason. The painting is about the rationalizing politics of calculation, quantification of life enacted by the insurance scheme that has incentivized the owner to drown the slaves under his control. Turner is doing something specific here. What this painting suggests is not that the violence of nature precedes or interrupts modernity, but that its violence and that of modernity are bound up in the same process. Incidentally, this painting was chosen as the cover of a book that proposes a counter narrative to dominant ecological thinking by Malcolm Ferdinand, a French researcher working on political ecology in the Caribbean. On this view, the painting may be read as a political critique through which Turner exposes the violence of industrialization. The body of those thrown overboard are made invisible by the slaver, but Turner decides to show what is left of them and this horror. I want now to try to contextualize the broader theme of excesses and overflows in Turner's works. Turner carefully selected what he would depict, yet his choice of representing the different substances of nature was an orthodox. In 18th century aesthetics, and more specifically in Joshua Reynolds's discourses, the concrete and material in painting was secondary to a more general idea, a higher subject. While Reynolds and Gainsborough painted forms of mediated materiality, the materiality of objects, such as fabric and leaves, the generation that followed and which included Turner, but also Constable, decided to depict the materiality of elements, less tangible matter, atmospheres, water, and light. Contemporary criticism of Turner's works constantly referred to his excessive materiality, his overuse of pigments, and the material accretion of substances on his canvases. Our historian Jennifer Roberts calls these elements, tenuous subjects, that is, I quote, flows and stuffs and unbounded matter of all kinds. Riesmans would say about Turner's paintings, they are celestial and fluvial celebrations, ce sont des fêtes célestes et fluviales. His works empathize texturally with their subjects, the amount to quest for a better understanding of the primary substances of existence. In his book, Lex Form, published, the X Form, published in 2017, the French critic Nicolas Bouriot contends that both art and politics were indelibly shaped by the centrifugal forces of the Industrial Revolution, social exclusion on the one hand and the rejection of certain objects, signs or images on the other. According to Bouriot, this logic of exclusion by way of analogy with thermodynamics became increasingly dominant as social energy produced more and more waste. Here, I address the flip side of this dynamic, the ways in which materiality and its politics came to the fore and informed Turner's works. Thereafter, arts that attempted to disrupt more traditional modes of representation would generally adopt the reverse movement, that is, a century-pedal motion which brings to the forefront everything that has been excluded. In a work such as Snow Storm's Team Boat of the Harbour's Mouth, Turner's vortex brings pure matter to the centre. By changing the rules of conventional representation, he favours an awareness of surface, a sculptural depth rather than a planner one. In this work, the representation of space no longer takes place on a two-dimensional surface, but on a three-dimensional medium representing the landscape. Not only is there no line of horizon for the viewer to read the picture, but Turner's sculptural technique of scrapping off and paring down of spots and streaks of impasto emphasises disruption and favours a swirling of the medium. The chaos of the scene depicted is echoed by the turmoil of matter that draws the viewer into the picture in a hypnotic way. Foam and spume mix with the steam and fumes of the ship. In this way, Turner figures humans and nature as coterminous to precisely the extent that perceptible bodies as such are absent from the scene. The thickness of the paint leaves only one possibility for the viewer to engage with the work. He has to indulge in its depths. According to Sarah Monks, Turner suggests here what it might be to be beneath, beneath the horizon, water and paint. In the sense, the work goes back to the very etymology of the sublime. In the absence of tall mountains or erupting volcanoes in Great Britain, Turner would find beauty in what Simon Shama described as the industrial sublime, smug and sprays in soup-spoing machines. In his iconic rain, steam and speed, a black mass rushes from the countryside towards us through clouds, showers and flickers. On the sides, a roaring boat and distant field are reminiscent of the old world. When commenting upon this painting, a contemporary critique, sorry, mentioned the two different responses triggered by the picture. It is Turner alova, which to one reader means wild rubbish looking as if he had flung his brush at the canvas instead of painting it. And to another, imaginative composition of the highest order and so true that uneducated eyes cannot comprehend its beauties. Here, Turner represents the beauty of air pollution. The work is at the same time a glorification of what was perceived at the time as the march of progress and the representation of the dirt and residues resulting from it, shown in art for one of the first times. What I find interesting about this is how it might help us think about our contemporary industrial sublime as we are confronted ever more frequently with images of natural catastrophes. Last September, a New York Times front page representing the smoke from cataclysmic wildfires over San Francisco infuriated people on social media. The minimalist photo aggludation of red, orange and black illustrating what this asphyxiating air full of carbon looked and felt like prompted charges that the paper was aestheticizing tragedy. Now, I wonder what differentiates such an image from Turner's sublime representation sublime representations of smog is this cover a form of the contemporary sublime? Incidentally, one of the ironic comments, captions that accompanied the photo on social media read not a Rothko. But could we not also draw a lineage to Turner? There's Rothko's famous quip, of course. This guy, Turner, he learned a lot from me. In a watercolor entitled The Lagoon Near Venice at Sunset, the poster of a Turner exhibition that opened in Paris last March. Yellow and turquoise washes and the skies parted with crimson clouds recall the color field look of a Rothko. But while Rothko's works are abstract, Turner's come as close as possible to the reality of the elements they represent. In the last 10 years, studies by scientists have shown that Turner's spectacular sunsets might have actually had something to do with volcanic eruptions around the globe. Scientists have looked at how volcanic matter in a stratosphere of post-eruption years correlated with the red to green pigment ratio in Turner's paintings. They found that the works were an accurate reflection of the amount of post-eruption aerosols in the atmosphere. In the year of the eruption and the three following years, some paintings by Turner had more red in their sunsets. This study shows how art might inform science, but it is also telling for how Turner might help us think about how we represent climate change. Perhaps the Times photographer's snapshot of a combustion that shows no horizon, no limit in its beauty has, like a Turner, forced us to question the position of mankind in the universe. The ecological imagination of smog often starts with Turner. In this paper, I have tried to look at how Turner's paintings were attempts to depict nature's residues, to recover them from the margins of the socially-representable. Present-day paradigms of ecological thinking can invite us to re-examine excessive factor, not only metaphorically, that is in the light of modernist discourses which hypothesized materiality, but concretely and post-entropocentrically. Yet it is only by doing so on the painter's own terms, resisting the anachronistic attribution of contemporary concerns with materiality to historical actors, that we can excavate the genuine politics that shaped the art objects on this study. Thank you. Thank you so much, Sarah, and you've given us a lot to think about and new ways to look at Turner's works. So thank you for that. We're going to move on to our fourth and final panelist, so please hold your questions for Sarah. We'll return to a moment after our next paper to ask questions to our final two panelists and to the panel as a whole. So our final speaker today is Nicholas Robbins. Dr. Robbins is a specialist in the history of 19th century art and visual culture in Europe and North America with an emphasis on Britain and its former empire. His research centers on the intersections of art ecology and scientific thought, particularly within histories of landscape photography and scientific visual culture. His current book project examines the aesthetic, scientific and cultural history of climate in the 19th century Atlantic world. And in just this September, he joined the Department of Art History at UCL as lecturer in British art. His paper today is entitled John Constable, The Powered and the Aesthetics of Climate. So welcome Nicholas Robbins. Thank you. Thank you so much, Julia. And thank you everyone for a really fantastic panel so far. I'm just going to share my screen and hopefully, is that working? Great. Thank you. In early 19th century Britain, the sky was often considered as a space of freedom. Quote that endless airy space, as William Hanslett wrote in 1820, where the eye wanders at liberty. Clouds such as John Constable's oil sketch here came to figure such unadministered visibility, suspended seemingly defying the laws of gravitational pull, moving distantly according to their own system. Constable's cloud studies have often been paired with the chemist and meteorologist, Luke Howard's 1803 cloud classification system, both of which exemplify attempts in the 19th century as this panel has amply demonstrated to give form to meteorological forces. This pairing and the question of influence that it has raised has occasioned a long art historical debate that hinges on a set of naughty relationships between art and science, romanticism and empiricism, experience and knowledge. But we might say that to look too closely at the clouds themselves somewhat misses the point. For Howard, on the one hand, clouds were merely modifications of the more significant flows of energy and electricity otherwise beyond perception. And turning Constable's oil sketch over, we find one of the painters famous faded ink notations recording the broader sensory conditions of the studies making. Notations that suggest that the painter too saw clouds as indices of larger movements situated in a continuum of marked time and spatial extension. Both Constable's private practice of oil sketching and Howard's early work on clouds served larger and more public projects. The artist's large exhibition paintings and the meteorologist's multi-volume, the climate of London in which numerous graphic systems were combined to represent London's average atmospheric state. In these projects, it is not the ephemeral experience of weather, which painter and naturalists sought to address, but rather climate, the quote condition of the atmosphere in regard to heat and moisture, which prevails at any given place as it was defined by the Encyclopedia Britannica in this moment. The process of giving sensible form to a prevailing atmospheric condition, that is the development of an aesthetics of climate, is the subject of my paper. Constable and Howard's images of the atmosphere in the 1820s were the paradoxical ground for the emergence of a regulatory perception that could grasp climate's illusive material and temporal constitution, and in turn reflected in an environment increasingly known through averaged aggregate, numerate information. Luke Howard had long been experimenting with graphic means of representing temporally extended sensation. Three years before his 1803 essay on cloud forms, he published a paper that more directly stages the passage between momentary experience and its attenuated abstraction. Alongside this paper, which considered the relationship between barometric pressure and the lunar cycle in the year 1798, Howard presented an object that though now familiar was a fairly recent addition to the visual language of natural history. Experimental data displayed along a coordinate grid expressing temporal duration, which is to say a graph. Meteorology was an important site for such graphic experimentation, partially because of the massive influx of observational data that attended it. And we can think here of the marvelous Humboldt diagram that Ben showed us earlier. Howard's engraved graph derived from his own daily observations count on a pre-printed coordinate paper, which you see it right, one which folded up into pocket size and traveled with Howard perhaps through the course of his days in 1798. But rather than merely recording the sinuous curve of the barometers falling and rising, Howard's chart presents as well the approximated average of barometric pressure periodized by the lunar cycle. Against this more strongly registered average, the faint and jumpy line of the barometric readings, the daily sort of sensation recede. The production of this average never actually experienced by Howard is of course the analytic aim of this graphic system. As Mary Poovey has argued of the modern fact more broadly, this calculated average hangs suspended between the reference to a particular inductive experience and its coordination within a broader system of knowledge. We might see these early visual experiments as Howard's attempts to work through the limitations of the usual form of displaying meteorological information, the table. As they were for all meteorologists of the period, tables were the primary container of information for Howard's extended project of observation. Along with his wife, Maria Bella, his son and his assistants, he collected continuous records of temperature, barometric pressure, precipitation, wind direction and other observation between 1806 and 1830 at his home in Tottenham and his chemical laboratories in Playstow and Stratford. This archive formed the basis for the climate of London, the first two volumes of which appeared in 1818 and 1820 with a revised three-volume addition in 1833. The majority of the climate of London is taken up by hundreds of such tables of Howard's data, facts that he wrote, which quote, properly arranged would form a history that is a history of the city's climate. What should art history make of an object such as a table filled numbers? In his work on 19th century Arctic travel narratives, Benjamin Morgan has argued that tables of meteorological information constitute an aesthetic of data, aesthetic in the sense that they document negotiations between bodies and environments between the narrative knowledge of the body and the tabulated knowledge of science. But as a form of visual representation, we might follow Howard as describing the tables as rather quote, the parts of a dissected map, a collocation that resists any form of design as he called it, or of narrativity. Figures of pure succession and peritactic accumulation, the tables produce a visual effect of overwhelming repetition and an excess of registration. Upon their publication, Howard's tables joined what one reviewer of the climate of London called simply and quite derisively a quote immense mass of meteorological facts. Such information still awaited proper analysis, perhaps because of the absence of a properly vivid or useful form of representation. As Howard admitted, this numerate history of London's climate aimed explicitly to provide the material for a future analysis, an activity from which he mostly refrained with one significant exception. Howard's measurements had been taken at London's expanding semi-suburban periphery. But when he compared his results with those held by the registers kept by the Royal Society at Somerset House, the very heart of London, he found that quote, the temperature of the city has hitherto been rated too high. The manuscript table you see here where he compares his and the Royal Society's data, both of which are repeatedly averaged and reduced, revealed this discontinuity. Howard described this discordance by claiming that quote, the mean of the latitude and level of London, which is to say the position London occupies in abstract cartographic space is two degrees cooler than quote, that of the metropolis itself. He continues quote, the temperature in the city is not to be considered as that of its climate. It partakes too much of artificial warmth induced by its structure, by a crowded population and consumption of great quantities of fuel. In a resulting graph that documents this disparity, the gap between the lines representing the Royal Society's and Howard's measurements, the sort of space you see here in the graph, separates the temperature of the city from the climate in the landscape in which it is set, effectively producing London itself as a kind of pathological aberrant object that obscures the definition of London's average climate. As George Conguyam has shown, the entwined and co-determinant relationship between the normal and the pathological was central to 19th century medical discourse. In this period in the 1820s in particular, he locates the beginnings of the emergence of a concept of normality defined by rigidity, as well as the increasing conflation of biological or statistical norms with social norms. And indeed, Howard's disarticulation of the normal landscape of climate, this sort of proper average that he himself has derived from its pathological heated state occurred within the context of other projects of identifying abnormality and managing risk. Part of what Ian Hacking has called the quote avalanche of printed numbers in the 1820s. Such printed numbers, to which Howard's weekly published tables of meteorological data belong, increasingly concerned the status of subjects in their social and political matrices, as with police registers and the census, for example. The fractious, rapidly expanding space of Imperial London gave rise as D.A. Miller puts it to a quote perceptual grid in which a division between the normal and the deviant inherently imposes itself. Biopolitical concerns were central to this era's thinking about climate, understood to be a force that govern the development and health of social formations. And it's something that could be improved in order to better shore up the power of the nation state and the empire. While political and social projects of normalization would later encompass visual representations of data of all sorts, Howard attempted early on to give aesthetic presence to the reality of this norm through his experiments with graphs, which he called curves. His most ambitious invention would be the circular chart that served as the frontispiece to the climate of London. This hand-colored engraving records the average daily temperature of London across an annual period plotted against a consistent yearly mean. Warmer and cooler periods are marked off in blue and red, as you see here, while the four seasons are themselves likewise denoted with their own color. In this seamless expression of layered temporal duration, which compresses 12 years of tabulated experience, Howard's pages and pages of numbers and facts are re-encoded in a kind of wobbly line set into the hypnotic ocular form of temporal concentricity. Howard's presentation of historical duration built on graphic experiments, such as Joseph Priestley's famous 1769 new chart of history, which staged a comparative synchronic account of world history or William Playfair's influential charts of international trade deficits from the 1780s. Yet unlike these models built along axes of temporal progression, Howard's model of London's normal climate collapsed 12 years of temporal passage into one averaged graphic space, which does not correspond to any particular moment in time, but rather to an enclosed or eternal present. For Howard, this chart expressed a quote, beautiful system of temperatures, a system resulting indeed from observation alone, but approaching perhaps as nearly to the boasted precision of mathematical science. Only thus in this visual form could meteorologies alliance to the numerate order of the modern fact apprehended. The striking form of this cosmological graph demands further interpretation. On the one hand, it would seem in the images deeply temporal register to relate to a different notion of the eternal present, that of English work discipline, of regimentation of laboring bodies and bodies by the clock face. And indeed the chart shape likely derived from the barograph clock that Howard purchased in 1814 that through a self registering mechanism concealed in the clock produced a circular annual paper date record of data. But perhaps that seems all a bit too determinant. And so we might also consider how Howard's graph, despite its alliance to the instruments and aesthetic apprehension of climate, also bears a formal analogy to the cyanometer, an instrument illustrated, invented by the Swiss naturalist or a spinodic de Saussure to measure the blueness of the sky and which is illustrated though not used in the climate of London. You see that in the middle there. Held between the eye of the observer and the sky, the cyanometer like Howard's graph exists in suspension between the immediate world of phenomena and the distantiated world of data, holding the two together in an unresolved tension. Something like such attention animates John Constable series of large scale exhibition paintings or six footers which he began to exhibit at the Royal Academy in 1818. My proposal is that Howard's representation of climate's attenuated normal state could help us locate the normative function of Constable's landscapes just as Jill and Darcy Wood has shown how climate change allows us to see differently his paintings divided historical nature. Howard again had imagined his book on climate as a series of quote, facts which properly arranged would form a history. And likewise we need to see Constable's landscape paintings again as sensory histories. They present facts properly arranged that compress the span of the artisans stored up perceptual experience. That which resulted from what his biographer, C.R. Leslie called his quote, constant study of the same objects under every change of seasons and of the times of day. We might take the Haywain exhibited, of course, in 1821 at the Royal Academy as the most complete expression of Constable's regulatory arrangements of facts. In the full size oil sketch for the painting, Constable lays out the spatial narrative elements of the work, the widespread of the cow canalized river stower, the pictorial anchor of the cottage and trees at left, the hay cart posed in the middle of the river's crossing, all of this rendered in rapid mobile brushwork. In the finished version, such mobility has been contained within Constable's much more minute brushwork, each element of the sketch strained as though through a sieve into properly constituted knowledge. The scumbled surface of the sketch and its frankly flattened sky has been replaced by a deeply recessional space and a volumetric matrix of cloud and air, a volume of cloud and clear light, as one critic put it in 1821, in which the canvas is not a surface of painterly experiment, but rather a container of stored up matter. The disciplining of the facture of his full size sketches would come to be much regretted by modernist critics, but it was precisely that discipline which Constable's task demanded. The varied scale of the painting's facture permits us to move forward and backward through the tightly interwoven system of his kioskuro, assimilating the varied scales of temporal duration, one that is infinitely slowed down, figured by the slow turn of the hay cart registered in the river's liquid materiality. In the succession of sketches that subtend these paintings, yet disappear under their taut surface, Constable's paintings offer us a form of ideality, of a normality whose link to the real, to the particulate of observation is never severed yet remains at the threshold of perception. And yet against this slow duration of the painting's spatial structures, Constable finishes paintings by returning the surface of the painting to pure presence. And I refer here to the notorious spots of pure white pigment distributed across his painting's surfaces, inaugurated with the hay wing. The flashes of sensation embodied in their suggestion of momentary shimmer bodies for Constable's fixation, as Mark Hallett has shown, upon the freshness and the dew of England's climate. Precisely that element which indexed its healthful vivifying nature. Freshness has a temporal register of course, but in this case, it also has a spatial one. This piebald scumbling of his canvases, which was seen by critics as Sarah showed us so beautifully with Turner as well. This kind of materiality was seen to work against the carefully calibrated naturalism of Constable's paintings. But his use of this pigment reflected in part the painter's anxiety about the integrity of his canvases as they transited across space, and especially as they entered into the urban climate that Howard's observations had so carefully tracked. As conservator Sarah Cove has shown, Constable consciously intensified the white brightness of his paintings, believing that they would be altered and darkened over time by what he called the impure or sulfurated air of London. Yet this operation also meant that the climate of London itself was in essence already present in this defensive deposition of suffix dues across the surface of his canvas. Just as Howard aimed to correct his carefully plotted and painted data against the register kept at Somerset House, Constable calibrated his painting such that what he called England's climate of more than vernal freshness would not be spoiled by the particular suspended in London's air. In this sense, the normal landscape to which Constable and Howard aimed, but to which both Constable and Howard aimed to give the appearance of permanent existence was secured in opposition to the pathologies of the urban environment. Thank you. Thank you so much, Nick. We have time now for questions for our final two speakers. And we have one question coming from Natalia Bosco. And this is a question for Dr. Robbins. Would you say that Constable understood the processes underlying meteorological phenomena or read sources on this matter other than Howard and Foster? That's a great question. I mean, I think he absolutely did. As sort of evident in the paper, I was trying to sort of move away from a question of influence, which has kind of dominated the discussion, I think rightfully so, but has dominated the discussion of the sort of relationship between Howard and Constable. But I think especially later in his life, in the 1830s, we know Constable was quite interested in reading about meteorology and reading about at least sort of popularized and sort of widely distributed meteorological texts. I guess what I was trying to get at is partially a kind of how we can think through his paintings as their own, as he wanted them to be thought of as their own forms of experiment, right? And experimenting with producing and representing sort of meteorology and its systems, not in the languages of science, but in the sort of languages of art and of materiality. But thanks for that question. I see that I think Mark has a question. Mark, did you want to jump in? Yeah, thank you. I don't want to take too much time if there are questions from the audience, but thanks for both of those papers amazing. And I have a question for Sarah. I think you really do give us a lot more purchase on even Turner's best known works than some of what you were showing us. I wonder if you could say, please, just a little bit more about how his practices of excess might also in a way evoke the immaterial. I think you were very, very powerful in showing the materiality of ocean spray and the residues. But I'm thinking especially of a picture like Snowstorm Harbor, where as we understand he was interested in Faraday's theories of magnetism, which presumably we can't see. So I wonder if immateriality enters in as well to your new reading of Turner. I think, thank you very much for this question. I mean, I guess, yes, I guess Turner, what I tried to show is that he, in a way he tries to go further than anyone else. And so in a way, yes, he in a work like Snowstorm, the immaterial is represented because may I perhaps refer to a more contemporary concept that I think helps us think about that. It's Timothy Morton's concept of the hyper object, these kind of bigger things than us that we have difficulties conceptualizing. And I think that in a way Turner tries to show these things that we have trouble, these stuff things immaterial forces that we have trouble, or that painters had trouble representing. So that's how I would answer your question, but it's food for thought. I'll have to think about it later. No, that makes, thank you. That makes good sense. That's a good reference point. Thanks. Thank you. So if any of our audience would like to ask a question or add a comment to the Q and A or raise your little blue hand, feel free to jump in. I might ask a question for all of the panelists to consider perhaps that I think might apply to various papers and that's the question of time or perhaps more aptly duration. And the way that so many of these papers address the idea of observation over time and the accretion or I'm thinking about the way that these various tables reveal so much of this information simultaneously and abstract terms. And I'm wondering also if this asks us or demands of us to rethink histories of abstraction. Nick, your paper certainly speaks to this. Ben, the cosmos charts. So this is just a general sort of question to for anyone to pick up on. Well, I'll just briefly, thanks for that question, Julia. And I think that the question of abstraction is really is a really sort of key one and maybe one that has to sort of come back and get rethought. And Sarah, your paper certainly really helped us see and rethink sort of what Turner's facture and what the kind of materiality and reality really of that paint could mean. And I think similarly to something that I'm still trying to think through with Constable and this question of his snow, right? And this notion of when painting moves between or when paints sort of breaks through into something that's not memetic but is referential at a kind of material level. But yeah, I think that this question of abstraction too is so much to do with a lot of, with the questions that a lot of the papers in this panel were addressed to, right? Which is how to, that quote that Ben brought in about sort of when induction ends, when do you reach that kind of system? When does this kind of experience of accumulation end? And I think that kind of fear almost and that need to contain in forms of abstraction, right? Is really key to various forms of environmental thinking whether scientific or artistic. So it's a great question. Can I add one little point to that? As somebody who's spent a few years in the fields of abstraction. I wonder if we could call it abstractness because I was really struck when Sarah put up the not the Rothko image of these. There's such slippage as we all know between abstraction as an artistic style and the abstractness as I would put it of numerals and numeracy. For me anyway would take it out of the realm of the strictly visual to not slide into that comparison between Turner and Rothko that as I remember Robert Rosenblum made some generations ago in a book whose title I can't remember on modern art was just pilloried for it for years and years and years. But certainly if we think of abstractness that's something that I was coming up against as well just the kind of functionality and yet total inappropriateness of all of these charts that Nicholas showed us with Howard. How can you possibly understand that? And one thing I would like to look into is whether some of the Inuit journeyers who Ross, John Ross and others came across people who were educated in the West as well as in their native ways with climate whether there was a kind of dialogue as there certainly was as most of you know around the visual Ross and others were getting the Inuits to draw maps for them and the maps were quite different but there was a commensurability that I don't think there is necessarily with the numbers. So it's a great question. Any other other speakers wanted to join in or we have time perhaps for one final question if anyone wants to pose it. Well, I mean I can talk about time just observations rather than just thinking of the Millet painting and what Mark was saying about the tripartite division of time. I thought was really interesting and it chimed with the sort of layers of time in the West all and also the temperals of aspects of the graphs and the tables that we looked at. And also this, yeah, Mark was talking about the shifting ground of the North Pole as well the way that it moves from time to time and it's difficult to the flag is a bit pointless to put it on. As I said, this is just, yeah, as I say just a series of observations but I did like the way that these talks sort of interconnected. Thank you very much. If there are no other questions, Mark I may hand it over to you for any final remarks and to speak about some of our upcoming talks. I'd like to thank all of our panelists. We have a number of thanks in the messages in the chats as well. Several comments from attendees who have very much enjoyed all of your talks. So thank you around a virtual applause to all of you for joining us today for this really fascinating set of papers. Thank you. Thank you very much Julia for doing such a lovely job chairing the session and thanks again, as you just said to all our speakers for four really interesting talks. I think the interconnections and overlaps between which and across which will only become more and more visible as we mull over them and think about them. I think those are talks that really did it was a testament I think to Anna Reed who was central in gathering together the different clusters of speakers that she found that she realized that there were these patterns of overlap and exchange between your papers and it's a great to bring you your four perspectives together. So thanks very much to all four of you and I think it was certainly was something that is not always the case added up to more than the sum of its parts in terms of the suggestions it raised. Before we'd all say goodbye, I just wanted to recommend the next event in the British art and natural forces season which is a keynote lecture by Anna Abinden Kesson which will be broadcast live at 1230 on Thursday. So that's something and it's very interesting because we were thinking initially of a pre-recorded film for Anna's keynote but now it's going to be delivered live with the opportunity than that generates for questions in a debate. So as I said that's taking place on Thursday at 1230 British time and it's entitled observation and diagnosis, pathologizing bodies, medicalizing space in the British Empire. Tickets are still available so you can sign up to that event. So please do so but they are because they are going quickly. So sign up when you can. So again, just to mention that to remind everyone who didn't catch this at the beginning that recordings of all of the events taking place in the season are being made and then subsequently being put on our website. So you have the chance to catch up on things that you might have missed and again see the connections that exist between all the different papers and events in the series as a whole. So thanks very much everyone for attending and we'll leave it there for now and look forward to seeing you at a future PMC British Art and Natural Forces event. Thank you very much indeed.