The dreamy haziness that defines much of Claude Monet’s work has long been chalked up to the artistic aims of Impressionism, the movement with which he has long been synonymous. But a new scientific study suggests that the French painter’s signature look wasn’t just a question of style—that, in fact, it maybe had more to do with the early effects of climate change.

The report, published earlier this year in a peer-reviewed journal called Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), argues that the works of Monet and a British artist that proceeded him, J.M.W. Turner, reflect changes in air pollution caused by the Industrial Revolution.

“I work on air pollution and while seeing Turner, Whistler, and Monet paintings at Tate in London and Musée d’Orsay in Paris, I noticed stylistic transformations in their works,” one of the study’s co-authors, Anna Lea Albright, told CNN.

Albright, a postdoctoral researcher for Le Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique at Sorbonne University, explained that “the contours of [these artist’s] paintings became hazier, the palette appeared wider, and the style changed from more figurative to more impressionistic. Those changes accord with physical expectations of how air pollution influences light,” she added.

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