Nature has inspired artists for generations. The term art has always conjured visions of beautiful landscapes and natural phenomena such as the setting of the sun and its rising, sandwiched between two mountains. Although the subject of the art has stereotypically been thought to have the sole purpose of functioning as a calming effect on our tired souls, artists have also used their canvases to portray human tragedies that have occurred in the midst of nature’s fury. These masterpieces have survived the test of time and have remained as visual documents of both environmental and social history.
The typhoon that devoured the dead
English artist JMW Turner, known for his landscapes and turbulent marine paintings, captured not only the terrifying splendour of a storm, but also the brutality of what happened to the human lives caught in it, in his celebrated painting titled ‘The Slave Ship’ from 1840. The work is based on the true story of the overloaded slave ship ‘Zong’ which crossed the Atlantic in 1781. Almost 130 enslaved African people were mercilessly thrown into the sea by the crew, on the orders of the captain, when the ship met with several navigational errors and storms. Water and food had to be conserved, and the decision to lighten the load by throwing off the sick into the depths of the sea was executed. As insurance was taken out on the lives of the slaves as cargo, the owners of the ship made claims for the ‘loss at sea.’ A legal dispute followed when the insurers refused to pay, and the massacre slowly gained publicity, especially among anti-slavery campaigners. The horror of it all has been depicted by Turner in his painting, which shows a ship sailing in a storm, with drowning human bodies around, accompanied by loose chains and hungry, menacing fishes — a gory sight indeed
Multi-coloured skies
The volcanic eruption in the Indonesian island of Krakatoa in August 1883 led to a series of tsunamis that wiped out coastal villages and killed almost 40,000 people. The impact affected most parts of the world, with temperatures dropping due to the ash and the debris in the Earth’s upper atmosphere. For two months, the evening skies in different countries took on the multi-coloured hues, creating spectacular sunsets. The Krakatoa Committee of the Royal Society hired William Ascroft to capture these visual displays. Every evening, the artist wandered through lanes and fields to paint the eruption’s afterglow. More than 500 of his paintings are today’s most important climatological archive of the alluring skies after a volcanic eruption.
When famine struck
When nature fails, the human race suffers. The Bengal Famine of 1943 led to the deaths of almost three million people. A devastating cyclone in 1942 and the spread of a crop disease culminated in a food shortage, which was ignored by the British colonial powers then. The situation worsened when the British authorities not only failed to provide relief measures but also diverted the scarce food stock for the World War II effort in Europe. Chittaprosad Bhattacharya, a Bengali artist, documented the injustice and misery of the starving millions with his stark sketches in black and white. His outlined forms, which showed skeletal shadows of humans on their deathbeds, hopelessness and hunger in their eyes, haunted the conscience of the nation and continues to be the most powerful famine reflections ever portrayed in art.
A catastrophic eruption
When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, it buried the Roman city of Pompeii under ash and debris. The doomed inhabitants fell prey to the massive surge of deposits. This natural catastrophe comes alive in the painting ‘The Last Day of Pompeii’ by renowned Russian painter Karl Bryullov in 1830. Although no one survived, the artist depicts himself fleeing the eruption along with a group of people and his prized possessions — his brushes and paints. This monumental canvas is one of the most chilling depictions of the destruction of Pompeii by an environmental disaster.
Sunset in Oslo
Who hasn’t heard of ‘The Scream’ by Edvard Munch, one of the most famous paintings in history? While William Ascroft made his scientific illustrations of the evening sky in Britain, the same orange sky was also observed by Edvard Munch in Oslo. In Munch’s own description, he stated, “I was walking along the road with two friends — then the sun set — all at once the sky became blood red — and I felt overcome with melancholy. I stood still and leaned against the railing, dead tired — clouds like blood and tongues of fire hung above the blue-black fjord and the city. My friends went on, and I stood alone, trembling with anxiety. I felt a great, unending scream piercing through nature.”
Scientists believe that the Krakatoa eruption was followed by the loudest sound ever recorded, which was heard over a tenth of the Earth’s surface, and this great scream from the depths of the Earth was perhaps reproduced by Munch as a metaphor for anxiety and existential dread in his iconic artwork.