not sure if in the right subreddit So I was reading this articlehttp://www.iflscience.com/space/what-if-our-cities-were-lit-billions-stars/ and got curious about what the sky must have looked like to people prior to electricity. But at the same time wondered if this is what it looks like without light pollution why aren't their more paintings of the night sky looking like this from those eras?
That picture is taken with a camera. The shutter would have remained open for a period of time to increase the amount of light entering the camera and recording on one image. The human eye can't do that and it isn't very sensitive.
From even a dark site you're going to see just a few thousand stars. The Milky Way is going to look like, well, a smear of white across the sky, hence its name.
You'll be able to see a few other galaxies, but they too will just look like dim, white smears and not very big at that either. In fact, it took until the 20th century for scientists to even realise that there were other galaxies and telescopes had been in use for centuries.
The Andromeda Galaxy has an apparent size in our sky of 6 Full Moons across. However, with the naked eye you can only see the bright core (which looks dim and smaller than the Full Moon). This is because of the inverse square law. If you double the distance you only get 1/4 of the intensity. The Andromeda Galaxy is a bit over 2 million light years away. It's just too far away to appear as anything but a dim smudge in the sky no matter how dark the site you're looking at it from.
Planets will just look like a star.
You'll see some nebulae but they too will just look like small smudges.
In low light our vision is terrible at seeing colour and on top of that the parts of our vision best suited to seeing in dim light doesn't have good resolution (the edges of your vision) which is why at night things look brighter at the edges of your vision but you may not be able to make out what they are.
Those pictures are exaggerated, and don't accurately represent what you can see with the naked eye. While you can certainly see the Milky Way for instance, it's impossible to see colour or that much detail in it. The same goes for nebulae and the nearest galaxies: to the naked eye they look like a tiny grey smudge (or a little cigar-shape, in Andromeda's case). The human eye simply does not see colour or details very well at low levels of illumination.
The images also show far more stars than the human eye can see, even in the darkest conditions. If you've ever been to a very dark place away from cities at night, you've pretty much seen what the skies would look like prior to light pollution. Certainly gorgeous, but not like those images.