A Victorian-era warning about climate was brought into a contemporary setting at the Oxford Museum of Natural History on 24 October, where John Ruskin’s 1884 lecture The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century was restaged as part of the IF Oxford science and ideas Festival.
The setting was significant because Ruskin had helped establish the museum.
His address is regarded as one of the first public warnings that industrial smoke was altering the sky.
Ruskin also spent decades observing atmospheric conditions before delivering the lecture.
Dr Dane Comerford, festival director of IF Oxford, said the presentation in a museum Ruskin had fought for made the subject feel connected to current events rather than merely historical.
He identified links between scientific and natural collections at the Museum of Natural History, Ruskin’s artwork at the Ashmolean and the sky represented in both.
Presented under the title Storm-Cloud: Observations of the Sky, the production was a 75-minute solo performance by Dr Tom Payne of Sheffield Hallam University.
Ruskin’s text was accompanied by projected moving images and a weather soundscape created by David John Brady.
The lecture itself addressed the transformed skies of the 19th century, which Ruskin linked to industrial smoke.
Earlier on 24 October, the Ashmolean’s Western Art Print Room made Ruskin’s original watercolour studies of skies and clouds available to view.
Several works also contained his pollution-related notes.
The event formed part of the wider IF Oxford Festival, which focuses on research, science and creativity.
Its programme also included Modelling the Undead: Zombies and Health, a Halloween experience based on science and examining the idea of a zombie pandemic.