AS WE noted yesterday, songwriter Percy French was attracted to his second forte, landscape painting, by a series of spectacular sunsets over Lough Sheelin, these in turn being caused by volcanic dust from the eruption of Krakatoa in the East Indies in 1883.
But French was not the only artist whose inspiration can be explained by volcanology. J.M.W. Turner is famous for the vivid, almost lurid, nature of his skies, and we have reason to believe that, here also, volcanoes may have played a part.
Turner was no dabbling dilettante. To capture the atmosphere for his famous painting Snowstorm, for example which depicts a North Sea blizzard at its height, the artist had himself lashed to the mast of the schooner Ariel in a raging storm. He remained in that position for a full four hours and this when no longer young, at the age of 67.
He was a mere stripling of a lad, however, when he painted Buttermere Lake, with part of Cromackwater a Shower in the late 1790s, and had yet to adopt his unconventional and somewhat controversial later style.
But here, too, a keen meteorological eye can be detected. Buttermere Lake portrays a lakeland scene on a dark and sombre day, and is dominated by a perfect rainbow, the spectral colours of which are accurately portrayed with the red on the outside.
Moreover, clearly visible outside the primary bow is the not uncommon secondary rainbow, and there is also a reflected rainbow what appears to be a portion of the primary are reflected from the surface of the lake below.
Given all this attention to meteorological detail, it is reasonable to assume that Turner's famous skies had a basis in reality. Examples of his flamboyant technique in this respect are the spectacular sunrise of Ulysses deriding Polyphemus, the clouded sunset in The Fighting Temeraire, and the flaming yellow sky in The Arch of Constantine in Rome. Indeed, Turner's colours became more extravagant as the 19th century progressed, evolving to a yellowy-red climax in the 1830s.
It is interesting to note therefore, that after a lull in volcanic activity between 1783 and 1802, a series of such events in the early decades of new century threw vast quantities of dust into the stratosphere.
Dust like this has the effect of filtering out the blue with great effectiveness from the light of the sun when it is near the horizon this allows the colours red and orange to predominate much more, for example, than is the case today. This volcanic dust may, in part at any rate, explain the apparent eccentricity of William Turner's style.