22 April 2010

Volcanos in art

Simon Winchester's overview of volcanoes in history in today's Guardian mentions the effect of the Krakatoa eruption in 1883 on artists:

"Krakatoa's immediate aftermath was dominated initially by dramatic physical effects – a series of tsunamis that were measured as far away as Portland Bill and Biarritz, a bang of detonation that was clearly heard (like naval gunfire, said the local police officer) 3,000 miles away on Rodriguez Island, and a year's worth of awe-inspiring evening beauty – astonishing sunsets of purple and passionfruit and salmon that had artists all around the world trying desperately to capture what they managed to see in the fleeting moments before dark. A Londoner named William Ascroft left behind almost 500 watercolours that he painted, one every 10 minutes like a human film camera, from his Thames-side flat in Chelsea; Frederic Church, of America's so-called Hudson River School, captured the crepuscular skies over Lake Ontario in their full post-Krakatoan glory; and many now agree that Edvard Munch had the purple and orange skies over Oslo in mind when 10 years afterwards he painted, most hauntingly, The Scream."

Here's a painting by AscroftFrederick Church (1826-1900) painted some lurid sunsets all right - have a look at these - but I couldn't find any post-Krakatoan ones.

My interest in Krakatoa stems from this book, written in 1947 by William Pene du Bois and read in childhoodPerhaps it stuck in my mind because of the picture of the raft floating over the volcano, which I realised even then was impossibly fantastic, or because of the vividness of trying to escape-Now what strikes me is this vignette -[Having reassured his audience that the foundations of the building are solid, the professor is about to resume his talk.] "Suddenly - and this was a sight which is a vivid to me now as it was when I first saw it - the wall opposite me slowly and almost noiselessly opened up in a crack large enough to allow the sun to shine through. It was the most terrifying and sinister sight I have ever seen. A considerable amount of powdered plaster dropped on the heads of the families in the room and the windows near the cracked wall broke open. The windows had all been closed so that the usual noise of the mountain wouldn't interfere with my talk. Now, through the crack in the wall and through the broken windows, the rumblings of the mountain thundered in full force."

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