Apocalyptic Skies in Art: Wildfires, Volcanoes and Art as Historical Documentation
- chantalsulkow
- Aug 3
- 6 min read
A shorter version of this article will appear in the American Artists Professional League quarterly newsletter, The Grapevine, in the Summer Issue.
This summer, smoke from more than 100 wildfires burning across Canada and Minnesota drifted southward, engulfing parts of the Midwest and Northeastern United States in haze, hazardous air pollution and eerily orange skies. Alongside the uncanny spectacle of these skies sat the devastating reality of fires destroying homes, habitats and communities, so it was jarring that the resulting atmospheric effects were extraordinarily striking. As an artist, I could not help but take notice of the color and light; I felt like I had been dropped into a sci-fi film.
View of The City of Rochester, New York, July 2026 (photo: Eric Snitil)
Photos of the sky in New York City, June, 2026 (left, photo courtesy Elizabeth W.) and Chicago (right, photo courtesy Sheryl Reiss)
L: Photo of the sky in New York City, June, 2026 (Photo courtesy Michele Chivu)
R: Photo of the sky in New York City, June, 2023 (Photo courtesy Chantal Sulkow)
Living in New York City with a view of the Hudson River, I was reminded of 2023, when smoke from northern wildfires similarly transformed the sky. After I had posted a photograph of the bridge and river outside my door under the strange, unnatural light, a sci-fi illustrator friend messaged to ask whether I had taken any sunset photographs. He thought they would make excellent references for an upcoming project.
Of course, this was the automatic default for a painter! Artists, eternally students of light, are always looking, no matter how unsettling. It was almost impossible not to draw comparisons to popular culture. Online, as a reaction to the current fires, people referenced the “Upside Down” in Netflix’s Stranger Things, while others posted film stills from Star Wars depicting orange sunsets on the planet Tatooine.
Stranger Things, Season 2, Netflix
The Planet Tatooine in Star Wars, A New Hope
Significantly, these recent fires were by no means the first time unusual atmospheric conditions have transformed the appearance of the sky and landscape, nor was this the first time artists have responded. To grasp the extent to which disasters in the natural world influence artists, it helps to look back at other catastrophes in history.
In 1815, the volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia released vast quantities of ash and fine particulate matter into the atmosphere. The eruption was catastrophic on a scale comparable to Pompeii: the village of Tambora was destroyed and an enormous number of people lost their lives. The resulting atmospheric cloud spread around the globe, cooling temperatures, disrupting weather patterns and reflecting sunlight back into space. The colors of the sky changed around the world.
Even more remarkably, much of the world had little or no understanding of what was happening. The telegraph had not yet been invented, and news of the eruption took months to reach Europe. People saw the skies changing color without knowing why, or even what they were seeing. In our modern age of instant communication, it's hard for us to imagine what this must have been like, seeing the world drastically transform with no outside lines of information.
Although the eruption occurred in April 1815, its effects continued well into 1816 and beyond; volcanic ash, soot, sulfurous gases, phosphates and other chemicals can alter atmospheric chemistry for months or even years. The resulting reduction in solar radiation produced what is known as a “volcanic winter,” contributing to the dramatic global cooling that followed Tambora and to what became known as the “Year Without a Summer.”
So: how did artists of the era react?
The British landscape painter Joseph Mallord William Turner was working during the years immediately following the eruption. Starting in 1816, he was commissioned to produce 120 watercolors for an illustrated history of Yorkshire. The resulting sketches and paintings offer a remarkable visual record of the landscapes and atmospheric conditions he encountered during this period. Even in history paintings such as The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire, painted in 1817, the volcanic sky figures prominently.
Joseph Mallord William Turner, Studies of a Sun Rising or Setting over a Landscape, 1816
Joseph Mallord William Turner, Red Sky and Crescent Moon, folio 54, from Skies Sketchbook [Finberg CLVIII]. 1818, watercolour. Tate, London. © Tate, London 2019
Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire, 1817, Tate Britain, London
Joseph Mallord William Turner, Vesuvius in Eruption, 1817 - 1820, Yale Center for British Art
In 1819, perhaps spurred by the effects of the Mount Tambora eruption, Turner visited Naples and climbed Mount Vesuvius. His painting Vesuvius in Eruption is thought to have been made before his trip to Italy, but demonstrates how significantly the fallout of natural disasters loomed in his imagination.
Caspar David Friedrich, Woman in Front of Setting Sun, 1818
Turner was not alone in responding to the unusual skies. In 1818, the German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich painted Woman in Front of Setting Sun, with its vivid orange sky and dramatic atmosphere.
L: Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, 2025
R: Maggie Gyllenhaal's The Bride, 2025
Writers and poets also responded. In 1816, the “Year Without a Summer” brought unusually cold temperatures, relentless rain and severe storms. During that stormy summer, Mary Godwin Shelley stayed at a villa in Switzerland with a group of Romantic poets, including Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. The experience, along with terrifying lightning storms, contributed to the atmosphere surrounding the writing of Frankenstein. The lightning motif continues in imagery for each iteration of the Frankenstein tale, as do the colors orange and red, as seen in two recent reimaginings of the story, both in Guillermo del Toro’s and Maggie Gyllenhaal's recent films.
William Ashcroft, Chelsea sunset, Autumn 1883, from The eruption of Krakatoa and Subsequent Phenomena, published in 1888
Decades later, another volcanic eruption produced a similarly dramatic atmospheric phenomenon. In August 1883, the Indonesian volcano Krakatoa erupted, sending enormous quantities of volcanic material into the atmosphere. The resulting sunsets were again observed across the world in November of that year, three months after the eruption, The New York Times wrote: “Soon after five o’clock, the western horizon suddenly flamed into a brilliant scarlet, which crimsoned sky and clouds. People in the streets were startled at the unwonted sight and gathered in little groups on all the corners to gaze into the west.”
At around the same time, the artist William Ashcroft recorded the progression of the Krakatoa sky as seen in Chelsea in London, England. Ashcroft was so taken with the sight that over the winter of 1883-84, he produced hundreds of similar sketches.
Edvard Munch, The Scream, 1893, National Museum and Munch Museum, Oslo
Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, writing in his journal of his impetus for painting The Scream, described a sunset he witnessed during the same period while out walking with friends: “Suddenly the sky turned blood red. There was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city.”
These stories may lead us to ask: how much of art should we understand as imagination and creativity, and how much can we read as historical documentation?
According to research led by Christos S. Zerefos, head of the Research Centre for Atmospheric Physics and Climatology at the Academy of Athens, art is very much in the realm of history. Zerefos and his colleagues analyzed the colors of sunsets depicted in hundreds of paintings dating from 1500 to 2000, a period that included more than 50 major volcanic eruptions. When volcanic aerosols enter the atmosphere, they can intensify red and orange sunsets. By comparing the colors depicted in paintings with ice core samples and other climate data, the researchers found a relationship between the intensity of atmospheric volcanic aerosols and the colors artists used to represent sunsets.
In short, paintings may indeed preserve evidence of environmental conditions that existed centuries ago.
Art and culture are often reflections of the social, political and environmental worlds in which they are created. When artists faithfully record what they see, their paintings can become more than an expression of imagination or individual experience; they also can become a historical and scientific document. Art recording the strange, apocalyptic skies produced by this year’s wildfires is not only capturing an unusual moment, but is also contributing to the historical record.
A lithograph of the 1883 Krakatoa eruption, featured in the “Report of the Krakatoa Committee of the Royal Society” in 1888. Credit: 71-1250, Houghton Library, Harvard University/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain
Help those affected by the wildfires: donate to the Canadian Red Cross Wildfire Fund: https://give.redcross.ca/page/24CWFA
You can see Turner’s “Skies Sketchbook” here:
FURTHER READING
Read more about volcanoes and environmental phenomena in art:
The Colour Club - “1816: The Year the Sky Changed Colour”
Science Friday - “The Art and History Shaped by Volcanic Winters”
Smith College - “Volcanoes in Art”
Minerva Magazine - “Under the Volcano”
Atlas Obscura- “See the Soft Aquarelle Watercolors That Resulted From Krakatoa’s Big Bang”
Zerefos et al. — “Environmental Information in Red-to-Green Ratios in Paintings by Great Masters” https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/7/4027/2007/acp-7-4027-2007.pdf
The Guardian — “How Old Masters Are Helping Study of Global Warming”
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