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sky-effects seen across Britain, in which the colours of Fauvism
and Expressionism danced across the northern skies.
To those on the spot, the eruption of Krakatoa did not just
mean extraordinary evening skies, but an experience of hell
on earth, as one terse eyewitness, the captain of the British ship
ss Charles Bell , wrote in his log:
At 5 [22 August 1883] the roaring noise continued and
increased, wind moderate from ssw, darkness spread
over the sky and a hail of pumice stone fell on us, many
pieces being of considerable size, and quite warm . . . The
continual explosive roars of Krakatoa, made our situation
a truly awful one . . . The sky one second intense blackness
and the next a blaze of fire, mastheads and yardarms studded
with corposants [phosphorescent electrical discharges, St
Elmo's Fire], and a peculiar pinky flame coming from
clouds which seemed to touch the mastheads and yardarms
. . . The ship from truck to waterline is as if cemented,
spars, sails, blocks, and ropes in a terrible mess but thank
God nobody hurt or ship damaged. On the other hand
how fares it with Auger, Merak, and other little villages
on the Java coast.'ยน9
The year 1883 also marked a break that was quite as shatter-
ing for European culture as it was for Pacific geology. A decade
earlier, Impressionism had arrived as a flash of discontent with
salon art in Paris. In 1883 the nineteenth-century musical
revolutionary Richard Wagner died, and these crucially twentieth-
century figures were born: the architect Walter Gropius, the
writer Franz Kafka, the demagogue Benito Mussolini, and the
leader of fashion Coco Chanel. Wagner's death marked the end
of one cultural period; the births of Gropius, Kafka, Mussolini
and Chanel the many beginnings of quite another. While artists'
depiction of landscape would alter radically after Impression-
ism, so after Krakatoa the depiction of volcanoes would change.
This was not as a result of the eruption itself, but one more
symptom of violent social, artistic and technological changes
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