Michael Wutky

He trained in Vienna as a history painter and made little headway. What turned his career was a mountain that was on fire.

In 1770 the Vienna Academy sent Wutky to Italy, and he stayed for years, first in Rome and then Naples. Naples sits under Vesuvius, the volcano that had buried Pompeii, and in those decades it was violently active. Wutky went toward it. With Sir William Hamilton, the British envoy in Naples and an obsessive student of the volcano, he climbed close to the crater to watch the lava and ash at night, near enough that the danger was real.

The paintings that came out of those years show the eruptions with an odd exactness, the glow on the smoke and the precise run of the lava down the slope. Until photography arrived, they were treated as the most scientifically accurate pictures of an erupting volcano anyone had made.