Der ausbrechende Vesuv

Turner made this blaze of a volcano around 1817, and here is the odd part. He had never seen Vesuvius. He wouldn't reach Naples until 1819, and when he finally climbed the mountain that year it was quiet. He never watched it erupt at all. The London publisher W. B. Cooke had asked him for a matched pair of watercolours, the volcano in fury and the volcano at rest, so Turner built this eruption from other artists' prints and travellers' accounts. Look at the water beneath the fire and you can see where he scraped the paint back to bare paper, letting the white of the sheet stand in for molten light on the bay.