Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Indian volcanic eruption has all the hallmarks of a work in oils
painted in the mountainous English Lake District or the High-
lands of Scotland.
Trusted for decades for his truthfulness in landscape depic-
tion, even Turner would make things up. We find within his
oeuvre
views in the West Indies, India, the Middle East and even
a minuscule view of the Andes from the Chilean coast, despite
the fact that he travelled to none of these places. There are also
paintings of eruptions of Vesuvius, none of which he witnessed
either. While he saw Vesuvius smoking, and even appears to
have climbed to the crater,³³ the volcano did not do him the
courtesy of erupting during the two weeks he was in Naples in
1819. What Turner did notice, however, and effortlessly depicted,
was that in October 1819 Vesuvius was smoking from two points
within the crater, and making two distinct plumes of white smoke
which, before the wind combined them into one, were visible by
his sharp eyes from as far away as the slopes above the city.
Turner's magnificent
Bay of Naples (Vesuvius Angry)
and
Eruption of Vesuvius
are fabrications, and we are dependent on
artists of lesser talent for the first shocking eyewitness accounts
J.M.W. Turner,
Naples:
Vesuvius, from Naples:
Rome
, from his
Colour
Studies Sketchbook
, 1819,
pencil and watercolour
on paper.
Image not available - no digital rights
