The horrific backstory to William Turner’s sunsets
When William Turner first started painting, people warned him that his choice of pigments, namely the shocking red carmine he often opted for, wouldn’t last. Their advice was right, and by 1930, it became clear a lot of his work was fading. What they didn’t account for was that as recently as the mid-2000s, his paintings have been used to measure historic environmental damage. While the colour wasn’t as sharp, his art had a totally different enduring quality.
Aside from their recent value in scientific studies, Turner’s landscapes have long been considered some of the most rousing in history – and arguably the most famous. Turner completely sidestepped the romantic notion of landscape painting favoured by the likes of Vincent van Gogh or Claude Monet. English art critic John Ruskin considered him the only artist able to “stirringly and truthfully measure the moods of nature”. His works were beautiful but heightened by a certain darkness, constantly capturing volatile scenes of fire and ash.
His 19th-century paintings immortalised the inherent danger of nature and consequently served as evidence of the “aerosol optical depth after major volcanic eruptions”. The eruption in question occurred in 1815 when Mount Tambora shot more than 36 cubic miles worth of shattered rock into the atmosphere with unfathomable force. Fatalities were said to be in the hundreds of thousands, and the boiling ash clouds devastated agriculture.
Even though Turner didn’t depict the human cost of the agricultural disaster, his sunsets spoke to the danger they posed and how they thickened the air. He elevated what landscape painting could be, moving them beyond picturesque and into searing societal relevancy.
It plummeted temperatures worldwide, and 1816 was soon dubbed the “year without a summer”. Unwittingly, Turner captured the fallout with incredible accuracy. Contemporary looks at his work point to a clear change in his palette after the eruption as being due to the changed levels of gas and ash in the air. He is one of many working artists at the time who completed what are called “volcanic sunsets”.
A curious outward gaze characterised all of Turner’s work. While he was primarily a landscape artist, he increasingly witnessed rapidly modernising culture and often reflected Britain’s industrial move in his work, too. He maintained lifelong interests in conflicts and culture, both of which were captured to devastating effect in his work.
In particular, Turner’s apocalyptic landscapes were rich in colour and depth and information. Researchers have even matched the ratio of red to green shades in his paintings to data about levels of volcanic matter in the air. That in itself sparked conversations about art as a visual measure of history, and it was Turner who pioneered its aesthetic language.
