The Eruption of the Soufrière Mountains in the Island of St Vincent, 30 April 1812

The eruption of the Soufrière volcano on St. Vincent on 30 April 1812 was reported in British newspapers with the vivid eyewitness accounts of planters and naval officers who had observed the eruption from the sea. Turner's 1815 painting of the event draws on these published accounts and engravings rather than direct observation, transforming a geological event in the distant Caribbean into a demonstration of the Romantic sublime's most elemental form: the earth itself convulsing with volcanic fire. The year 1815 was also the year of the much larger eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, which produced the famously cold and dark summer of 1816 — the 'Year Without a Summer' — when Byron and Shelley were in Geneva and Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein. Turner's volcanic paintings exist within this moment of intense cultural fascination with geological catastrophe. In 1815 he also exhibited Dido Building Carthage, his most consciously classical work, and the juxtaposition of the two subjects — ancient civilization's founding and distant volcanic destruction — shows the full range of his historical and natural imagination at this period.

Turner renders the volcanic eruption with dramatic contrasts of fire and darkness, using the explosive energy of the subject to justify his most experimental handling of light and atmospheric effects.