Paintings in the Year Without a Summer

Hubbard, Zachary. “Paintings in the Year Without a Summer.” Philologia 11, no. 1 (2019): pp. 17–33. DOI: https://doi.org/10.21061/ph.173 RESEARCH Paintings in the Year Without a Summer Zachary Hubbard Virginia Tech, US The world of art changed in 1816. Paintings representing the brightest of skies of the European landscape now revealed the dark sun that seemed to take heat away from the world. Artist of this time did not understand why, but the atmosphere they were trying to depict was darker than that of the past. The dawns and sunsets that were the main focal points of their art and provided light and hope became redder and darker. A sense of perpetual darkness is shown, even with the light of the sun or the shine of the moon depicted in the skies above. Regardless, artists still looked to the heavens for inspiration, and their depictions have become snapshots of history in this “year without a summer,” showing that life, though hard, continued under a depressing atmosphere. With resilience and hard work, Europeans were able to live through this time, once again seeing the warmth of summer years later. The art created by J.M.W. Turner, John Crome, Caspar David Friedrich, and many other artists showed the changes in the atmosphere but also revealed how the lives of people were forced to continue in the face of darkness. Through their landscape paintings, common themes emerge, such as agriculture, religion, and shipping that will later have significant meaning to the people of these cold times in northern Europe. Keywords: Volcano; Art; Paintings; Survival; Atmosphere; Global Cooling The world of art changed in the year 1816. Before, artists filled their skies with the light of the sun to capture the beauty of the land. The sun gave an explosion of color, warmth, and protection to the people of the world; artists used the sun to convey feelings of joy and safety throughout the world. But during 1816 and for years after, the sun was engulfed in a constant red haze that kept the daylight from penetrating to the Earth’s surface. This haze came from the eruption of Mount Tambora, located on the island of Sumbawa in the Dutch East Indies, off the coast of Indonesia. In April of 1815, this massive mountain exploded in an apocalyptic fashion, losing most of its height and killing almost everyone on or near the island. Huge amounts of ash, dust, and chemicals shot straight into the stratosphere near the equator, quickly covering the Northern Hemisphere and the rest of the planet. The ash and gasses reflected much needed sunlight away from the planet, causing the climate to cool. This cooling then caused disastrous effects on all life on the planet; it would be years before these clouds of ash and sulfur dissipated from the atmosphere, warming the Earth once again.1 This coverage influenced paintings, as the haze introduced new red hues to the atmospheres of paintings that were not present before Tambora’s ash cloud covered the Earth. The haze created a filter of sorts across the sky, and not all artists knew from where the darkness came, fearing its emergence as a sign that their worlds were coming to an end. Paintings of the coast of England that had once represented the brightest of skies now featured a dark sun that seemed to take the heat from the world instead of providing it. The dawns and sunsets that usually provided light and hope became redder, darker, and more foreboding. The art seemed to be in perpetual darkness, even with the light of the sun or the shine of the moon depicted in the skies above. Caspar David Friedrich was one of many artists to give us a record of such a drastic change. His painting Landscape with Rainbow (1810) (Figure 1), as the name suggests, depicts a large field with contrasting shades of green, a dusky sky, and a faded rainbow across the canvas.2 Completed in 1810, Friedrich’s work gives the viewer the idea of optimism in the view of danger, with bright greens and colorful rainbows contrasted against a dark sky. Although the clouds are dark, the bright colors seem to escape from the possible danger, giving the viewer a sense of calm although the sky appears ready to storm at any time. The calmness would not last, as it would be replaced with anxiety in fewer than seven years. 1 2 Gillen D’Arcy Wood, Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World (New Jersey: Princeton Univ. Press, 2015). Caspar David Friedrich, Landschaft mit Regenbogen, 1810, oil and canvas, 59 × 84, missing since 1945, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caspar_David_Friedrich_027.jpg. 18 Hubbard: Paintings in the Year Without a Summer Figure 1: Landschaft mit Regenbogen or Landscape with Rainbow, 1810. Figure 2: Zwei Männer am Meer or Two Men by the Sea, 1817. In 1817, Caspar David Friedrich created another painting called Zwei Männer am Meer or Two Men by the Sea (Figure 2), depicting two men in the center on a dark, sandy beach watching the sky.3 The bright optimism that was a sign of a greater future in Landscape with Rainbow was replaced by signs of dread, confusion, and uncertainty. The atmosphere was now dominated by a dark haze that covered everything, distorting the bright light of the sun into something murky that no one could understand or comprehend. Regardless of the darker trends in their art, artists still looked to the heavens for 3 Caspar David Friedrich, Zwei Männer am Meer, 1817, oil and canvas, 51 × 61 cm, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany, https://commons.wikimedia. org/wiki/File:Caspar_David_Friedrich_(5)Two_Men_by_the_Sea.JPG. Hubbard: Paintings in the Year Without a Summer 19 inspiration. Their artwork became snapshots of history under the Mount Tambora sun, depicting that life was hard, but not impossible in the “year without a summer.” With resilience and hard work, Europeans of this time lived through the cold, knowing they would see the warmth of summer again in years to come. The artworks created by J.M.W. Turner, John Crome, Caspar David Friedrich, and many others show the changes in the atmosphere and reveal how people adapted to survive in the face of darkness. Through their landscape paintings, common themes emerge, such as agriculture, religion, and the shipping industry, representing either the hope or despair of the people of these cold times in northern Europe. Through their work, artists of the time tended to display their surroundings as naturalistically as possible. This realism gives the viewer a better account of what the land looked like to the artist at the time the painting was created and what the world seemed like to the people of 1816. Since artists had been painting what they saw around them before and after the explosion, a timeline of sorts can be created from the art to better understand the explosion of Mount Tambora. Because of this, these paintings were later used as scientific data on volcanoes of the past to help understand how these gasses traveled and dispersed over time through firsthand (...truncated)